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PS Number 171 





COMPENSATION 
SELF-RELIANCE 
BAND OTHER ESSAYS 

II BY 

>S j RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

H 

Selected and Edited 

BY 
MARY A. JORDAN 



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COMPENSATION, SELF 
EELIANCE 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 

BY 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

EDITED BY 

MARY A. JORDAN, M. A. 

Prqfessor of English Language and Literature 
Smith College 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 85 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : 378-388 Wabash Avenue 



CONTENTS 






Compensation, Essays, First Series ...... 1 

Experience, Essays, Second Series 29 

Character, Essays, Second Series 61 j 

Self-Reliance, Essays, First Series 83 

Heroism, Essays, First Series . . . . ' . . . 117 
Explanatory and Critical Notes . . . 133i 



COPYRIGHT I903 AND I904 BY EDWARD W. EMERSON 
COPYRIGHT 1907 BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



LISRARY of CONGRESS 


Two Cooles Heceivod 

SEP 18 I90f 


_ Copyright Bntiy 
CLASS * XXC, NO. 
COPY B. 



COMPENSATION 

The wings of Time are black and white, 
Pied with morning and with night. 
Mountain tall and ocean deep 
Trembling balance duly keep. 
In changing moon, in tidal wave, 
Glows the feud of Want and Have. 
Gauge of more and less through space 
Electric star and pencil plays. 
The lonely Earth amid the balls 
That hurry through the eternal halls, 
A makeweight flying to the void, 
Supplemental asteroid, 
Or compensatory spark, 
Shoots across the neutral Dark. 1 



Man's the elm, and Wealth the vine, 
Stanch and strong the tendrils twine: 
Though the frail ringlets thee deceive, 
None from its stock that vine can reave. 
Fear not, then, thou child infirm, 
There 's no god dare wrong a worm. 2 
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts 
And power to him who power exerts; 
Hast not thy share? On winged feet, 
Lo! it rushes thee to meet; 
And all that Nature made thy own, 
Floating in air or pent in stone, 
Will rive the hills and swim the sea 
And, like thy shadow, follow thee. 



COMPENSATION 

Ever since I was a boy I have wished to write 
a discourse on Compensation; for it seemed to me 
when very young that on this subject life was ahead 
of theology and the people knew more than the 
preachers taught. The documents too from which the 
doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their 
endless variety, and lay always before me, even in 
sleep ; for they are the tools in our hands, the bread 
in our basket, the transactions of the street, the farm 
and the dwelling-house; greetings, relations, debts 
and credits, the influence of character, the nature 
and endowment of all men. It seemed to me also 
that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the 
present action of the soul of this world, clean from 
all vestige of tradition; and so the heart of man might 
be bathed by an inundation of eternal love, convers- 
ing with that which he knows was always and always 
must be, because it really is now. It appeared more- 
over that if this doctrine could be stated in terms 
with any resemblance to those bright intuitions in 
which this truth is sometimes revealed to us, it would 
be a star in many dark hours and crooked passages 
in our journey, that would not suffer us to lose our 
way. 

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing 
a sermon at church. The preacher, a man esteemed 
for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner 
the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed that 
judgment is not executed in this world; 'that the 



4 ESSAYS 

wicked art£ successful; that the good are miserable; 
and them urged from reason and from Scripture a 
compel} sation to be made to both parties in the next 
life. |No offence appeared to be taken by the congre- 
gation at this doctrine. As far as I could observe 
-#hen the meeting broke up they separated without 
remark on the sermon. 

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What 
did the preacher mean by saying that the good are 
miserable in the present life? Was it that houses 
and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are 
had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor 
and despised; and that a compensation is to be 
made to these last hereafter, by giving them the like 
gratifications another day, — bank-stock and doub- 
loons, venison and champagne? This must be the 
compensation intended; for what else? Is it that 
they are to have leave to pray and praise? to love 
and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The 
legitimate inference the disciple would draw was, — 
' We are to have such a good time as the sinners have 
now;' — or, to push it to its extreme import, — 'You 
sin now, we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, 
if we could; not being successful we expect our re- 
venge to-morrow.' 

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the 
bad are successful; that justice is not done now. 3 The 
blindness of the preacher consisted in deferring to 
the base estimate of the market of what constitutes 
a manly success, instead of confronting and convict- 
ing the world from the truth; announcing the pre- 
sence of the soul; the omnipotence of the will; and 
so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success 
and falsehood. 



COMPENSATION 5 

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious 
works of the day and the same doctrines assumed by 
the literary men when occasionally they treat the re- 
lated topics. I think that our popular theology has 
gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the su- 
perstitions it has displaced. But men are better than 
their theology. Their daily life gives it the lie. Every 
ingenuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine be- 
hind him in his own experience, and all men feel some- 
times the falsehood which they cannot demonstrate. 
For men are wiser than they know. 4 That which they 
hear in schools and pulpits without afterthought, if 
said in conversation would probably be questioned in 
silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on 
Providence and the divine laws, he is answered by a 
silence which conveys well enough to an observer the 
dissatisfaction of the hearer, but his incapacity to 
make his own statement. 

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter 5 
to record some facts that indicate the path of the law 
of Compensation; happy beyond my expectation if I 
shall truly draw the smallest arc of this circle. 

Polarity, or action and reaction, 6 we meet in every 
part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and 
cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and fe- 
male; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and 
animals; in the equation of quantity and quality in 
the fluids of the animal body; in the systole and dias- 
tole of the heart; in the undulations of fluids and of 
sound; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity; in 
electricity, galvanism, and chemical affinity. Super- 
induce magnetism at one end of a needle, the oppo- 
site magnetism takes place at the other end. If the 



6 ESSAYS 

south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you 
must condense there. An inevitable dualism bisects 
nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests an- 
other thing to make it whole; as, spirit, matter; man, 
woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; 
upper, under; motion, rest; yea, nay. 

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its 
parts. The entire system of things gets represented in 
every particle. There is somewhat that resembles the 
ebb and flow of the sea, day and night, man and wo- 
man, in a single needle of the pine, in a kernel of corn, 
in each individual of every animal tribe. The reac- 
tion, so grand in the elements, is repeated within these 
small boundaries. For example, in the animal king- 
dom the physiologist has observed that no creatures 
are favorites, but a certain compensation balances 
every gift and every defect. A surplusage given to one 
part is paid out of a reduction from another part of 
the same creature. If the head and neck are enlarged, 
the trunk and extremities are cut short. 

The theory of the mechanic forces is another ex- 
ample. What we gain in power is lost in time, and the 
converse. The periodic or compensating errors of the 
planets is another instance. The influences of cli- 
mate and soil in political history is another. The cold 
climate invigorates. The barren soil does not breed 
fevers, crocodiles, tigers or scorpions. 

The same dualism underlies the nature and condi- 
tion of man. Every excess causes a defect; every de- 
fect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil 
its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure 
has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer 
for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit 
there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have 



COMPENSA TION 7 

missed, you have gained something else; and for every 
thing you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, 
they are increased that use them. If the gatherer 
gathers too much, Nature takes out of the man what 
she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the 
owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The 
waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from 
their loftiest tossing than the varieties of condition 
tend to equalize themselves. There is always some 
levelling circumstance that puts down the overbear- 
ing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially 
on the same ground with all others. Is a man too strong 
and fierce for society and by temper and position a 
bad citizen, — a morose ruffian, with a dash of the 
pirate in him ? — Nature sends him a troop of pretty 
sons and daughters who are getting along in the dame's 
classes at the village school, and love and fear for 
them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she 
contrives to intenerate the granite and felspar, takes 
the boar out and puts the lamb in and keeps her bal- 
ance true. 

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. 

But the President has paid dear for his White House. 

It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best 

of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time 

so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is 

content to eat dust before the real masters who stand 

erect behind the throne. Or do men desire the more 

substantial and permanent grandeur of genius ? 7 Neither 

has this an immunity. He who by force of will or of 

thought is great and overlooks thousands, has the 

\\ charges of that eminence. With every influx of light 

f« comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear wit- 

i ness to the light, 8 and always outrun that sympathy 



8 ESSAYS 

which gives him such keen satisfaction, by his fidelity 
to new revelations of the incessant soul. 9 He must 
hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he all 
that the world loves and admires and covets ? — he 
must cast behind him their admiration and afflict 
them by faithfulness to his truth and become a byword 
and a hissing. 10 

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is 
in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things 
refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male 
administrari. 11 Though no checks to a new evil appear, 
the checks exist, and will appear. If the government 
is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too 
high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the 
criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If 
the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If 
the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is 
resisted by an over-charge of energy in the citizen, and 
life glows with a fiercer flame. The true life and satis- 
factions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or 
felicities of condition and to establish themselves with 
great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. 
Under all governments the influence of character re- 
mains the same, — in Turkey and in New England 
about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, 
history honestly confesses that man must have been 
as free as culture could make him. 

These appearances indicate the fact that the uni- 
verse is represented in every one of its particles. 12 Every 
thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. 
Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the nat- 
uralist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and 
regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swim- 
ming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted 



COMPENSATION 9 

man. Each new form repeats not only the main char- 
acter of the type, but part for part all the details, all 
the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies and whole 
system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, 
transaction, is a compend of the world and a correla- 
tive of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of 
human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, 
its course and its end. And each one must somehow 
accommodate the whole man and recite all his destiny. 

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The mi- 
croscope cannot find the animalcule which is less per- 
fect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, 
resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that 
take hold on eternity, — all find room to consist in 
the small creature. So do we put our life into every 
act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God 
reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. 
The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into 
every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the 
affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation. 

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. 
That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us 
is a law. We feel its inspiration; but there in history 
we can see its fatal strength. " It is in the world, and 
the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. 
A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. 
'Act yap ev ttitttovo-lv ol Aios kv/Joi, 13 — The dice of God are 
always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication- 
table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how 
you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will,, 
its exact value, nor more nor less, still returns to you. 
Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every 
virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and 
certainty. What we call retribution is the universal 



10 



ESS A YS 



necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part 
appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you 
see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to 
which it belongs is there behind. 

Every act rewards itself, or in other words inte- 
grates itself, in a twofold manner; first in the thing, 
or in real nature; and secondly in the circumstance' 
or in apparent nature. Men call the circumstance the 
retribution. The causal retribution is in the thing and 
is seen by the soul. The retribution in the circum- 
stance is seen by the understanding; it is inseparable 
irom the thing, but is often spread over a long time 
and so does not become distinct until after many years. 
The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, 
but they follow because they accompany it. Crime 
and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment 
is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower 
of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, 
means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed,' 
for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre- 
exists in the means, the fruit in the seed. 

Whilst thus the world will be whole and refuses to 
be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to 
appropriate; for example, —to gratify the senses we 
sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the 
character. The ingenuity of man has always been 
dedicated to the solution of one problem, —how to 
detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sen- ' 
sual bright, etc., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, 
the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean 
off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; 
to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, 
' Eat; ' the body would feast. The soul says, ' The man 
and woman shall be one flesh and one soul;' the body 



COMPENSATION 11 

would join the flesh only. The soul says, 'Have do- 
minion over all things to the ends of virtue;' the body 
would have the power over things to its own ends. 

The soul strives amain to live and work through all 
things. It would be the only fact. All things shall be 
added unto it, — power, pleasure, knowledge, beauty. 
The particular man aims to be somebody; to set up 
for himself; to truck and higgle 14 for a private good; 
and, in particulars, to ride that he may ride; to dress 
that he may be dressed; to eat that he may eat; and 
to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to be great; 
they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. 
They think that to be great is to possess one side of 
nature, — the sweet, without the other side, the bitter, 

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. 
Up to this day it must be owned no projector has had 
the smallest success. The parted water reunites be- 
hind our hand. Pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, 
profit out of profitable things, power out of strong 
things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the 
whole. We can no more halve things and get the sen- 
sual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that 
shall have no outside, or a light without a shadow. 
"Drive out Nature with a fork, she comes running 
back." 15 

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the 
unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags 16 
that he does not know, that they do not touch him ; — 
but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. 
If he escapes them in one part they attack him in an- 
other more vital part. If he has escaped them in form 
and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted 
his life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so 
much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to 



12 ESSAYS 

make this separation of the good from the tax, that 
the experiment would not be tried, — since to try it is 
to be mad, — but for the circumstance that when the 
disease begins in the will, of rebellion and separation, 
the intellect is at once infected, so that the man ceases 
to see God whole in each object, but is able to see 
the sensual allurement of an object and not see the 
sensual hurt; he sees the mermaid's head but not the 
dragon's tail, and thinks he can cut off that which he 
would have from that which he would not have. " Hoy 
secret art thou who dwellest in the highest heavens ii 
silence, O thou only great God, sprinkling with an 
unwearied providence certain penal blindnesses upon 
such as have unbridled desires!" 17 

The human soul is true to these facts in the paint- 
ing of fable, of history, of law, of proverbs, of conver- 
sation. It finds a tongue in literature unawares. Thus 
the Greeks called Jupiter, Supreme Mind ; but having 
traditionally ascribed to him many base actions, they 
involuntarily made amends to reason by tying up the 
hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as a 
king of England. Prometheus knows one secret which 
Jove must bargain for; Minerva, another. He can- 
not get his own thunders; Minerva keeps the key of 
them : — 

" Of all the gods, I only know the keys 
That ope the solid doors within whose vaults 
His thunders sleep." 18 

A plain confession of the in-working of the All and of 
its moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same 
ethics; and it would seem impossible for any fable lo 
be invented and get any currency which was not moral. 
Aurora forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though 
Tithonus is immortal, he is old. Achilles is not quite 



COMPENSATION 13 

invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel 
by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the Nibe- 
lungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his 
back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's blood, and 
that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it must 
be. There is a crack in every thing God has made. It 
would seem there is always this vindictive 19 circum- 
stance stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy 
in which the human fancy attempted to make bold 
holiday and to shake itself free of the old laws, — this 
mck-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the 
law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all 
things are sold. 

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps 
watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchas- 
tised. The Furies, they said, are attendants on justice, 
and if the sun in heaven should trangress his path they 
would punish him. The poets related that stone walls 
and iron swords and leathern thongs had an occult 
sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the 
belt which Ajax gave Hector dragged the Trojan hero 
over the field at the wheels of the car of Achilles, and 
the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that on whose 
point Ajax fell. They recorded that when the Thasians 
erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, 
one of his rivals went to it by night and endeavored to 
throw it down by repeated blows, until at last he moved 
it from its pedestal and was crushed to death beneath 
its fall. 20 

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It 
came from thought above the will of the writer. That 
is the best part of each writer which has nothing pri- 
vate in it; that which he does not know; that which 
flowed out of his constitution and not from his too 



14 ESSAYS 

active invention; that which in the study of a single 
artist you might not easily find, but in the study°of 
many you would abstract as the spirit of them all. 
Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that early 
Hellenic world that I would know. The name and 
circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for his^ 
tory, embarrass when we come to the highest criticism. 
We are to see that which man was tending to do in a 
given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modi- 
fied in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, 
of Dante, of Shakespeare, the organ whereby man at 
the moment wrought. 

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in 
the proverbs of all nations, which are always the lit- 
erature of reason, or the statements of an absolute 
truth without qualification. Proverbs, like the sacred 
books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intui- 
tions. That which the droning world, chained to ap- 
pearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own 
words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without 
contradiction. And his law of laws, which the pulpit, 
the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in 
all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, 
whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that 
of birds and flies. 

All things are double, one against another. —Tit 
for tat; an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood 
for blood; measure for measure; love for love. — 
Give, and it shall be given you. —He that watereth 
shall be watered himself. — What will you have ? 
quoth God; pay for it and take it. —Nothing ven- 
ture, nothing have. —Thou shalt be paid exactly for 
what thou hast done, no more, no less. —Who doth 
not work shall not eat. — Harm watch, harm catch. 



COMPENSATION 15 

— Curses always recoil on the head of him who im- 
precates them. — If you put a chain around the neck 
of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your 
own. — Bad counsel confounds the adviser. —The 
Devil is an ass. 21 

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our 
action is overmastered and characterized above our 
will by the law of nature. We aim at a petty end quite 
aside from the public good, but our act arranges itself 
by irresistible magnetism in a line with the poles of 
the world. 

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With 
his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the 
eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion 
reacts on him who utters it. It is a thread-ball 22 thrown 
at a mark, but the other end remains in the thrower's 
bag. Or rather it is a harpoon hurled at the whale, 
unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, and, 
if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go 
nigh to cut the steersman in twain or to sink the boat. 

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. 
"No man had ever a point of pride that was not in- 
jurious to him," said Burke. 23 The exclusive in fash- 
ionable life does not see that he excludes himself from 
enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it. The ex- 
clusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the 
door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. 
Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer 
as well as they. If you leave out their heart, you shall 
lose your own. The senses would make things of all 
persons; of women, of children, of the poor. The 
vulgar proverb, " I will get it from his purse or get it 
from his skin," is sound philosophy. 

All infractions of love and equity in our social re- 



16 ESSAYS 

lations are speedily punished. They are punished by 
fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my fellow- 
man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. We meet 
as water meets water, or as two currents of air mix, 
with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of nature. 
But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity 
and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not 
good for him, my neighbor feels the wrong; he shrinks 
from me as far as I have shrunk from him; his eyes 
no longer seek mine; there is war between us; there 
is hate in him and fear in me. 

All the old abuses in society, universal and particu- 
lar, all unjust accumulations of property and power, 
are avenged in the same manner. Fear is an instruc- 
tor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions. 
One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where 
he appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see 
not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. 
Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our culti- 
vated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and 
mowed and gibbered over government and property. 
That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He indi- 
cates great wrongs which must be revised. 

Of the like nature is that expectation of change 
which instantly follows the suspension of our volun- 
tary activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the eme- 
rald of Polycrates, 24 the awe of prosperity, the instinct 
which leads every generous soul to impose on itself 
tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are 
the tremblings of the balance of justice through the 
heart and mind of man. 

Experienced men of the world know very well 
that it is best to pay scot and lot 25 as they go along, 
and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. 



COMPENSA TION 17 

The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained 
any thing who has received a hundred favors and 
rendered none ? Has he gained by borrowing, through 
indolence or cunning, his neighbor's wares, or horses, 
or money? There arises on the deed the instant 
acknowledgment of benefit on the one part and of 
debt on the other; that is, of superiority and inferi- 
ority. The transaction remains in the memory of him- 
self and his neighbor; and every new transaction 
alters according to its nature their relation to each 
other. He may soon come to see that he had better 
have broken his own bones than to have ridden in 
his neighbor's coach, and that "the highest price he 
can pay for a thing is to ask for it." 

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of 
life, and know that it is the part of prudence to face 
every claimant and pay every just demand on your 
time, your talents, or your heart. Always pay; for 
first or last you must pay your entire debt. Persons 
and events may stand for a time between you and 
justice, but it is only a postponement. You must 
pay at last your own debt. If you are wise you will 
dread a prosperity which only loads you with more. 
Benefit is the end of nature. But for every benefit 
which you receive, a tax is levied. He is great who 
confers the most benefits. He is base, — and that 
is the one base thing in the universe, — to receive 
favors and render none. In the order of nature we 
cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive 
them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must 
be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent 
for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good 
staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm 
worms. 26 Pay it away quickly in some sort. 



18 ESSA YS 

Labor is watched over by the same pitiless laws. 
Cheapest, say the prudent, is the dearest labor. What 
we buy in a broom, a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some 
application of good sense to a common want. It is 
best to pay in your land a skilful gardener, or to buy 
good sense applied to gardening; in your sailor, 
good sense applied to navigation; in the house, good 
sense applied to cooking, sewing, serving; in your 
agent, good sense applied to accounts and affairs. 
So do you multiply your presence, or spread your- 
self throughout your estate. But because of the dual 
constitution of things, in labor as in life there can 
be no cheating. The thief steals from himself. The 
swindler swindles himself. For the real price of labor 
is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit 
are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be 
counterfeited or stolen, but that which they repre- 
sent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be coun- 
terfeited or stolen. These ends of labor cannot be 
answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in 
obedience to pure motives. The cheat, the defaulter, 
the gambler, cannot extort the knowledge of material 
and moral nature which his honest care and pains 
yield to the operative. The law of nature is, Do the 
thing, and you shall have the power; but they who 
do not the thing have not the power. 

Human labor, through all its forms, from the sharp- 
ening of a stake to the construction of a city or an 
epic, is one immense illustration of the perfect com- 
pensation of the universe. The absolute balance of 
Give and Take, the doctrine that every thing has its 
price, — and if that price is not paid, not that thing 
but something else is obtained, and that it is impos- 
sible to get anything without its price, — is not less 



COMPENSATION 19 

sublime in the columns of a leger 27 than in the budgets 
of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the 
action and reaction of nature. I cannot doubt that 
the high laws which each man sees implicated in those 
processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics 
which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are mea- 
sured out by his plumb and foot-rule, which stand 
as manifest in the footing of the shop-bill as in the 
history of a state, — do recommend to him his trade, 
and though seldom named, exalt his business to his 
imagination. 

The league between virtue and nature engages 
all things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beau- 
tiful laws and substances of the world persecute and 
whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged 
for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide 
world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth 
is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as 
if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals 
in the woods the track of every partridge and fox 
and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken 
word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot 
draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. 
Some damning circumstance always transpires. The 
laws and substances of nature — water, snow, wind, 
gravitation — become penalties to the thief. 

On the other hand the law holds with equal sure- 
ness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. 
All love is mathematically just, as much as the two 
sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has 
absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its 
own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm; 
but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when 
he approached cast down their colors and from enemies 



20 ESSAYS 



became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, 
oftence, poverty, prove benefactors: — 

" Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave and power and deity, 
Yet in themselves are nothing." 28 

The good are befriended even b y weakness and 
detect. As no man had ever a point of pride that was 
not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that 
was not somewhere made useful to him. The stag in 
the fable admired his horns and blamed his feet but 
when the hunter came, his feet saved him, and after- 
wards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroved him 
Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. 
As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he 
has contended against it, so no man has a thorough 
acquaintance with the hindrances or talents of men 
until he has suffered from the one and seen the tri- 
umph of the other over his own want of the same. 
Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in 
society? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself 
alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like 
the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl. 

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The 
indignation which arms itself with secret forces does 
not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely 
assailed. A great man is always willing to be little. 
Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes 
to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, 
he has a chance to learn something; he has been put 
on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; 
learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of con- 
ceit; has got moderation and real skill. The wise man 
throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more 
his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point. 



COMPENSA TION 21 

The wound cicatrizes and falls off from him like a 
dead skin, and when they would triumph, lo! he has 
passed on invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. 
I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all 
that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance 
of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise 
are spoken for me I feel as one that lies unprotected 
before his enemies. In general, every evil to which 
we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich 
Islander believes that the strength and valor of the 
enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the 
strength of the temptation we resist. 

The same guards which protect us from disaster, 
defect and enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfish- 
ness and fraud. Bolts and bars are not the best of 
our institutions, nor is shrewdness in trade a mark of 
wisdom. Men suffer all their life long under the fool- 
ish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is 
as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but 
himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same 
time. There is a third silent party to all our bargains. 
The nature and soul of things takes on itself the 
guaranty of the fulfilment of every contract, so that 
honest service cannot come to loss. If you serve an 
ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God 
in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The 
longer the payment is withholden, the better for you; 
for compound interest on compound interest is the 
rate and usage of this exchequer. 

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors 
to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a 
rope of sand. It makes no difference whether the 
actors be many or one, a tyrant or a mob. A mob is 
a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves 



22 ESSAYS 

of reason and traversing its work. 29 The mob is man 
voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. Its 
fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane, 
like its whole constitution. It persecutes a principle; 
it would whip a right; it would tar and feather jus- 
tice, by inflicting fire and outrage upon the houses 
and persons of those who have these. It resembles 
the prank of boys, who run with fire-engines to put 
out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The in- 
violate spirit turns their spite against the wrongdoers. 
The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash in- 
flicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illus- 
trious abode; every burned book or house enlightens 
the world ; every suppressed or expunged word rever- 
berates through the earth from side to side. Hours 
of sanity, and consideration are always arriving to 
communities, as to individuals, when the truth is seen 
and the martyrs are justified. 

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of cir- 
cumstances. The man is all. Every thing has two 
sides, a good and an evil. Every advantage has its 
tax. I learn to be content. But the doctrine of com- 
pensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. The 
thoughtless say, on hearing these representations, — 
What boots it to do well ? there is one event to good 
and evil; if I gain any good I must pay for it; if I 
lose any good I gain some other; all actions are indif- 
ferent. 

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensa- 
tion, to wit, its own nature. The soul is not a com- 
pensation, but a life. ThesouHs. Tinder all this running 
sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with 
perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. 
Essence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the 



COMPENSATION 23 

whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding nega- 
tion, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, 
parts and times within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, 
are the influx from thence. Vice is the absence or 
departure of the same. Nothing, Falsehood, may 
indeed stand as the great Night or shade on which as 
a background the living universe paints itself forth, 
but no fact is begotten by it; it cannot work, for it is 
not. It cannot work any good; it cannot work any 
harm. It is harm inasmuch as it is worse not to be 
than to be. 

We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil 
acts, because the criminal adheres to his vice and con- 
tumacy and does not come to a crisis or judgment 
anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning 
confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. 
Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he 
carries the malignity and the lie with him he so far 
deceases from nature. In some manner there will be 
a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding 
also; but, should we not see it, this deadly deduction 
makes square the eternal account. 

Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the 
gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There 
is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they 
are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action 
I properly am; in a virtuous act I add to the world; 
I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and No- 
thing and see the darkness receding on the limits of 
the horizon. There can be no excess to love, none to 
knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are 
considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, 
and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism. 

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct 



24 ESS A YS 

is trust. Our instinct uses " morp " and *' less " in appli- 
cation to man, of the presence of the soul, and not of 
its absence ; the brave man is greater than the coward ; 
the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and 
not less, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on 
the good of virtue, for that is the incoming of God 
himself, or absolute existence, without any compara- 
tive. Material good has its tax, and if it came without 
desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind 
will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the 
soul's, and may be had if paid for in nature's lawful 
coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head 
allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, 
for example to find a pot of buried gold, knowing 
that it brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more 
external goods, — neither possessions, nor honors, 
nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the 
tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge 
that the compensation' exists and that it is not desir- 
able to dig up treasure. 30 Herein I rejoice with a serene 
eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible 
mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard, "No- 
thing can work me damage except myself; the harm 
that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am 
a real sufferer but by my own fault." 

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for 
the inequalities of condition. The radical tragedy of 
nature seems to be the distinction of More and Less. 
How can Less not feel the pain ; how not feel indigna- 
tion or malevolence towards More? Look at those 
who have less faculty, and one feels sad and knows 
not well what to make of it. He almost shuns their 
eye; he fears they will upbraid God. What should 
they do? It seems a great injustice. But see the 



COMPENSATION 25 

facts nearly and these mountainous inequalities van- 
ish. Love reduces them as the sun melts the iceberg 
in the sea. The heart and soul of all men being 
one, this bitterness of His and Mine ceases. His is 
mine. I am my brother and my brother is me. If I 
feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, 
I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth 
maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I 
make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, 31 
acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the 
estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is the 
nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus 
and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul, and by 
love I conquer and incorporate them in my own con- 
scious domain. His virtue, — is not that mine ? His 
wit, — if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit. 

Such also is the natural history of calamity. The 
changes which break up at short intervals the pros- 
perity of men are advertisements of a nature whose 
law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity 
quitting its whole system of things, its friends and 
home and laws and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out 
of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer 
admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. 32 
In proportion to the vigor of the individual these 
revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind 
they are incessant and all worldly relations hang very 
loosely about him, becoming as it were a transparent 
fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, 
and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogene- 
ous fabric of many dates and of no settled character, 
in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be 
enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recog- 
nizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the 



26 ESS A YS 

outward biography of man in time, a putting off of 
dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his 
raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, 
resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with 
the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks. 

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let 
our angels go. We do not see that they only go out 
that archangels may come in. 33 We are idolaters of the 
old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its 
proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe 
there is any force in to-day to rival or recreate that 
beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old 
tent where once we had bread and shelter and organs, 
nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve 
us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so 
sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The 
voice of the Almighty saith, ■ Up and onward for ever- 
more ! ' We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we 
rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted 
eyes, like those monsters who look backwards. 

And yet the compensations of calamity are made 
apparent to the understanding also, after long inter- 
vals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappoint- 
ment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the 
moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure 
years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies 
all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, 
lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat 
later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it 
commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, ter- 
minates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was 
waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, 
or a household, or style of living, and allows the for- 
mation of new ones more friendly to the growth of 



COMPENSATION 27 

character. It permits or constrains the formation of 
new acquaintances and the reception of new influences 
that prove of the first importance to the next years; 
and the man or woman who would have remained a 
sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and 
too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the 
walls and the neglect of the gardener is made the 
banian 34 of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide 
neighborhoods of men. 



EXPERIENCE 

The lords of life, the lords of life, — 
I saw them pass, 
In their own guise, 
Like and unlike, 
Portly and grim, 
Use and Surprise, 
Surface and Dream, 
Succession swift, and spectral Wrong, 
Temperament without a tongue, 
And the inventor of the game 
Omnipresent without name; — 
Some to see, some to be guessed, 
They marched from east to west: 
Little man, least of all, 
Among the legs of his guardians tall, 
Walked about with puzzled look : — 
Him by the hand dear Nature took; 
Dearest Nature, strong and kind, 
Whispered, 'Darling, never mind! 
To-morrow they will wear another face, 
The founder thou! these are thy race!' 



EXPERIENCE 

Where do we find ourselves ? In a series of which 
we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has 
none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there 
are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; 
there are stairs above us, many a one, which go up- 
ward and out of sight. But the Genius which accord- 
ing to the old belief stands at the door by which we 
enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell 
no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot 
shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers 
all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day 
in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. 
Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. 
Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not 
know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit 
of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so 
sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it 
appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, 
and though we have health and reason, yet we have 
no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have 
enough to live and bring the year about, but not an 
ounce to impart or to invest. Ah that our Genius were 
a little more of a genius! We are like millers on the 
lower levels of a stream, when the factories above them 
have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the 
upper people must have raised their dams. 

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we 
are going, then when we think we best know! We do 
not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In times 



32 ESS A YS 

when we thought ourselves indolent, we have after- 
wards discovered that much was accomplished and 
much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofit- 
able while they pass, that 't is wonderful where or 
when we ever got anything of this which we call wis- 
dom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated 
calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been 
intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes * won 
with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It 
is said all martyrdoms looked mean when they were 
suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that 
we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel 
and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life 
looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem 
to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual 
retreating and reference. 2 'Yonder uplands are rich 
pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but 
my field,' says the querulous farmer, 'only holds the 
world together.' I quote another man's saying; un- 
luckily that other withdraws himself in the same way, 
and quotes me. 'T is the trick of nature thus to de- 
grade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a 
result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable 
to the eye until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and 
moaning women and hard-eyed husbands and deluges 
of Lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the news?' as if 
the old were so bad. How many individuals can we 
count in society? how many actions? how many 
opinions ? So much of our time is preparation, so much 
is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of 
each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. 
The history of literature — - take the net result of Tira- 
boschi, Warton, or Schlegel 3 — is a sum of very few 
ideas and of very few original tales; all the rest being 



EXPERIENCE 33 

variation of these. So in this great society wide lying 
around us, a critical analysis would find very few 
spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross 
sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem 
organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the uni- 
versal necessity. 

What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows 
formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no 
rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding 
surfaces; we fall soft on a thought; Ate Dea* is gentle, 

"Over men's heads walking aloft, 
With tender feet treading so soft." 5 

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not 
half so bad with them as they say. There are moods 
in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at 
least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of 
truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and coun- 
terfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know 
how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about 
the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, 
for contact with which we would even pay the costly 
price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich 6 who found 
out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls 
never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes 
with silent waves between us and the things we aim at 
and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. 
In the death of my son, 7 now more than two years ago, 
I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, — no more. I 
cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be 
informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, 
the loss of my property would be a great inconve- 
nience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would 
leave me as it found me, — neither better nor worse. 



34 ESSAYS 

So is it with this calamity; it does not touch me ; some- 
thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could 
not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged 
without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no 
scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach 
me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. 
The Indian 8 who was laid under a curse that the wind 
should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor 
fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events 
are summer rain, and we the Para 9 coats that shed 
every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We 
look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, There at 
least is reality that will not dodge us. 

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, 
which lets them slip through our fingers then when we 
clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our 
condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and 
likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We 
may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a 
berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never 
gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our 
hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are 
oblique and casual. 

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to 
illusion. Life is a train of moods 10 like a string of 
beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be 
many-colored lenses which paint the world their own 
hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From 
the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what 
we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature 
and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends 
on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sun- 
set or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and 



EXPERIENCE 35 

there is always genius ; but only a few hours so serene 
that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or 
less depends on structure or temperament. Tempera- 
ment is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. 
Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective 
nature ? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination 
a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in 
his chair ? or if he laugh and giggle ? or if he apolo- 
gize? or is infected with egotism? or thinks of his 
dollar ? or cannot go by food ? or has gotten a child 
in his boyhood ? Of what use is genius, if the organ 
is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal 
distance within the actual horizon of human life? 
Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and 
the man does not care enough for results to stimulate 
him to experiment, and hold him up in it? or if the 
web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and 
pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception 
without due outlet ? Of what use to make heroic vows 
of amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep 
them ? What cheer can the religious sentiment yield, 
when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on 
the seasons of the year and the state of the blood ? I 
knew a witty physician n who found the creed in the 
biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease 
in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that 
organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very morti- 
fying is the reluctant experience that some unfriendly 
excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. 
We see young men who owe us a new world, so read- 
ily and lavishly they promise, but they never acquit 
the debt; they die young and dodge the account; or if 
they live they lose themselves in the crowd. 

Temperament also enters fully into the system of 



36 ESSAYS 

illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we 
cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every 
person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of 
given temperament, which will appear in a given 
character, whose boundaries they will never pass; but 
we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume 
there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems 
impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be 
a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of 
the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion 
in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, 
that temper prevails over everything of time, place 
and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of 
religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment 
avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its 
dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to 
fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment. 

I thus express the law as it is read from the platform 
of ordinary life, but must not leave it without noticing 
the capital exception. For temperament is a power 
which no man willingly hears any one praise but 
himself. On the platform of physics we cannot resist 
the contracting influences of so-called science. Tem- 
perament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental 
proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the 
phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, 
they esteem each man the victim of another, who 
winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his 
being; and, by such cheap signboards as the color 
of his beard or the slope of his occiput, reads the in- 
ventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest 
ignorance does not disgust like this impudent know- 
mgness. The physicians say they are not materialists; 
but they are: Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme 



EXPERIENCE 37 

thinness : O so thin ! — But the definition of spiritual 
should be, that which is its own evidence, 12 What 
notions do they attach to love ! what to religion ! One 
would not willingly pronounce these words in their 
hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them. 
I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversa- 
tion to the form of the head of the man he talks with ! 
I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable 
possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in address- 
ing myself to a new individual, what may befall me. 
I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to 
throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in 
what disguise soever he shall appear. I know he is in 
the neighborhood, hidden among vagabonds. Shall I 
preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindly 
adapting my conversation to the shape of heads ? 
When I come to that, the doctors shall buy me for a 
cent. — 'But, sir, medical history; the report to the 
Institute; the proven facts!' — I distrust the facts 
and the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limi- 
tation-power in the constitution, very justly applied 
to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution, but 
absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When 
virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep. 
On its own level, or in view of nature, temperament is 
final. I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of 
so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the 
links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such 
an embryo, such a history must follow. On this plat- 
form one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon 
come to suicide. 13 But it is impossible that the creative 
power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence 
there is a door which is never closed, through which 
the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute 



38 ESSAYS 

truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes 
for our succor, and at one whisper of these high 
powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with this 
nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, 14 and cannot 
again contract ourselves to so base a state. 

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of 
a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would 
anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand. This onward 
trick of nature is too strong for us: Pero si muove. 15 
When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem 
stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real 
draws us to permanence, but health of body consists 
in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility 
of association. We need change of objects. Dedica- 
tion to one thought is quickly odious. We house with 
the insane, and must humor them; then conversation 
dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne that 
I thought I should not need any other book; before 
that, in Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; 
at one time in Bacon; afterwards in Goethe; even 
in Bettine; 16 but now I turn the pages of either of 
them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. 
So with pictures; 17 each will bear an emphasis of 
attention once, which it cannot retain, though we fain 
would continue to be pleased in that manner. How 
strongly I have felt of pictures that when you have 
seen one well, you must take your leave of it; you 
shall never see it again. I have had good lessons from 
pictures which I have since seen without emotion or 
remark. A deduction must be made from the opinion 
which even the wise express on a new book or occur- 
rence. Their opinion gives me tidings of their mood, 
and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise 



EXPERIENCE 39 

to be trusted as the lasting relation between that intel- 
lect and that thing. The child asks, 'Mamma, why 
don't I like the story as well as when you told it me 
yesterday?' Alas! child, it is even so with the oldest 
cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy ques- 
tion to say, Because thou wert born to a whole and 
this story is a particular ? The reason of the pain this 
discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect 
to works of art and intellect) is the plaint of tragedy 
which murmurs from it in regard to persons, to friend- 
ship and love. 18 

That immobility and absence of elasticity which 
we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist. 
There is no. power of expansion in men. 19 Our friends 
early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas 
which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the 
brink of the ocean of thought and power, but they 
never take the single step that would bring them there. 
A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, 20 which has no 
lustre as you turn it in your hand until you come to a 
particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful 
colors. There is no adaptation or universal applica- 
bility in men, but each has his special talent, and the 
mastery of successful men consists in adroitly keep- 
ing themselves where and when that turn shall be 
oftenest to be practised. We do what we must, and 
call it by the best names we can, and would fain have 
the praise of having intended the result which ensues. 
I cannot recall any form of man who is not superflu- 
ous sometimes. But is not this pitiful? Life is not 
worth the taking, to do tricks in. 

Of course it needs the whole society to give the sym- 
metry we seek. The party-colored wheel must revolve 
very fast to appear white. Something is earned too 



40 ESS A YS 

by conversing with so much folly and defect. In fine, 
whoever loses, we are always of the gaining party. 21 
Divinity is behind our failures and follies also. The 
plays of children are nonsense, but very educative 
nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, 
with commerce, government, church, marriage, and 
so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways 
by which he is to come by it. Like a bird which alights 
nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, 
is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, 
but for a moment speaks from this one, and for an- 
other moment from that one. 

But what help from these fineries or .pedantries ? 
What help from thought ? Life is not dialectics. 22 We, 
I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the 
futility of criticism. Our young people have thought 
and written much on labor and reform, and for all that 
they have written, neither the world nor themselves 
have got on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not 
supersede muscular activity. If a man should con- 
sider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down 
his throat, he would starve. At Education Farm 23 the 
noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young 
men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. 
It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not 
rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left 
pale and hungry. A political orator wittily compared 
our party promises to western roads, which opened 
stately enough, with planted trees on either side to 
tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and nar- 
rower and ended in a squirrel -track and ran up a tree. 
So does culture with us; it ends in headache. Unspeak- 
ably sad and barren does life look to those who a few 



EXPERIENCE 41 

months ago were dazzled with the splendor of the 
promise of the times. "There is now no longer any 
right course of action nor any self-devotion left among 
the Iranis." 24 Objections and criticism we have had 
our fill of. There are objections to every course of 
life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an in- 
differency, from the omnipresence of objection. The 
whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not 
craze yourself with thinking, but go about your busi- 
ness anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but 
sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who 
can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature 
hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense 
when they say, " Children, eat your victuals, and say 
no more of it." To fill the hour, — that is happiness; 
to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or 
an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art 
of life is to skate w r ell on them. Under the oldest moul- 
diest conventions a man of native force prospers just 
as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of 
handling and treatment. 25 He can take hold anywhere. 
Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will 
not bear the least excess of either. 26 To finish the mo- 
ment, to find the journey's end in every step of the 
road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is 
wisdom. 27 It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or 
of mathematicians if you will, to say that, the short- 
ness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether 
for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or 
sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us 
husband them. Five minutes of to-day are worth as 
much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. 
Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, to-day. Let 
us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they 



42 ESS A YS 

were real; perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, 
like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremu- 
lous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, 
and the only ballast I know is a respect to the pre- 
sent hour. Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this 
vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the 
firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and 
refer 28 and wish, but do broad justice where we are, 
by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual 
companions and circumstances, however humble or 
odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe 
has delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are 
mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the 
last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the 
heart than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy 
of admirable persons. I think that however a thought- 
ful man may suffer from the defects and absurdities 
of his company, he cannot without affectation deny 
to any set of men and women a sensibility to extraor- 
dinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an in- 
stinct of superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and 
honor it in their blind capricious way with sincere 
homage. 

The fine young people despise life, but in me, and 
in such as with me are free from dyspepsia, and to 
whom a day is a sound and solid good, it. is a great 
excess of politeness to look scornful and to cry for com- 
pany. I am grown by sympathy a little eager and 
sentimental, but leave me alone and I should relish 
every hour and what it brought me, the potluck 29 of the 
day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room. 
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes 
with one of my friends who expects everything of the 
universe and is disappointed when anything is less 



EXPERIENCE 43 

than the best, and I found that I begin at the other 
extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of 
thanks for moderate goods. I accept the clangor and 
jangle of contrary tendencies. I find my account in 
sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circum- 
jacent picture which such a vanishing meteorous ap- 
pearance can ill spare. In the morning I awake and 
find the old world, wife, babes and mother, Concord 
and Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the 
dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we 
find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping mea- 
sures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Every- 
thing good is on the highway. The middle region of 
our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into 
the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless 
science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these 
extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, 
of poetry, — a narrow belt. Moreover, in popular ex- 
perience everything good is on the highway. A col- 
lector peeps into all the picture-shops of Europe for a 
landscape of Poussin, 30 a crayon-sketch of Salvator; 31 
but the Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Com- 
munion of Saint Jerome, 32 and what are as transcend- 
ent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizi, 33 
or the Louvre, where every footman may see them; 
to say nothing of Nature's pictures in every street, of 
sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of 
the human body never absent. A collector recently 
bought at public auction,, in London, for one hundred 
and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakspeare ; 
but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and 
can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpub- 
lished therein. I think I will never read any but the 
commonest books, — the Bible, Homer, Dante, Shak- 



44 ESS A YS 

speare and Milton. Then we are impatient of so 
public a life and planet, and run hither and thither for 
nooks and secrets. The imagination delights in the 
woodcraft of Indians, trappers and bee-hunters. We 
fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately 
domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the 
wild beast and bird. But the exclusion reaches them 
also; reaches the climbing, flying, gliding, feathered 
and four-footed man. Fox and woodchuck, hawk and 
snipe and bittern, when nearly seen, have no more 
root in the deep world than man, and are just such 
superficial tenants of the globe. Then the new mo- 
lecular philosophy 34 shows astronomical interspaces 
betwixt atom and atom, shows that the world is all 
outside; it has no inside. 

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, 
is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, 
Gentoos and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish 
by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and 
sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beau- 
tiful, are not children of our law; do not come out of 
the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctu- 
ally keep the commandments. If we will be strong 
with her strength we must not harbor such disconso- 
late consciences, borrowed too from the consciences 
of other nations. We must set up the strong present 
tense 35 against all the rumors of wrath, past or to 
come. So many things are unsettled which it is of the 
first importance to settle; — and, pending their settle- 
ment, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes 
forward on the equity of commerce, and will not be 
closed for a century or two, New and Old England 
may keep shop. Law of copyright 36 and international 
copyright is to be discussed, and in the interim we 



EXPERIENCE 45 

will sell our books for the most we can. Expediency 
of literature, 37 reason of literature, lawfulness of writ- 
ing down a thought, is questioned ; much is to say on 
both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dear- 
est scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every 
hour, and between whiles add a line. Right to hold 
land, right of property, is disputed, and the conven- 
tions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away 
in your garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or 
godsend to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life 
itself is a bubble and a scepticism, and a sleep within 
a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will, — 
but thou, God's darling! heed thy private dream; 
thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and scepti- 
cism; there are enough of them; stay there in thy 
closet and toil until the rest are agreed what to do 
about it. Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit 
require that 'thou do this or avoid that, but know 
that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and 
do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. 38 Thou art 
sick, but shalt not be worse, and the universe, which 
holds thee dear, shall be the better. 

Human life is made up of the two elements, power 
and form, and the proportion must be invariably 
kept if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of 
these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful 
as its defect. Everything runs to excess; every good 
quality is noxious if unmixed, and, to carry the danger 
to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man's pecu- 
liarity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we 
adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery. 
They are nature's victims of expression. You who 
see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near, and find 
their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or 



46 ESS A YS 

farmers, and themselves victims of partiality, very 
hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures, 
not heroes, but quacks, — conclude very reasonably 
that these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet 
nature will not bear you out. Irresistible nature made 
men such, and makes legions more of such, every day. 
You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a draw- 
ing or a cast; yet what are these millions who read 
and behold, but incipient writers and sculptors ? Add 
a little more of that quality which now reads and 
sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if 
one remembers how innocently he began to be an 
artist, he perceives that nature joined with his enemy. 
A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must 
walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of 
wisdom is made a fool. 39 

How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep 
forever these beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, 
once for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom 
of known cause and effect! In the street and in the 
newspapers, life appears so plain a business that 
manly resolution and adherence to the multiplica- 
tion-table through all weathers will insure success. 
But ah! presently comes a day, or is it only a half- 
hour, with its angel-whispering, — which discomfits 
the conclusions of nations and of years ! To-morrow 
again every thing looks real and angular, the habit- 
ual standards are reinstated, common-sense is as rare 
as genius, — is the basis of genius, and experience 
is hands and feet to every enterprise; — and yet, he 
who should do his business on this understanding 
would be quickly bankrupt. Power keeps quite an- 
other road than the turnpikes of choice and will; 
namely the subterranean and invisible tunnels and 



EXPERIENCE 47 

channels of life. It is ridiculous that we are diplo- 
matists, and doctors, and considerate people; there are 
no dupes like these. Life is a series of surprises, and 
would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not. 
God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from 
us the past and the future. We would look about us, 
but with grand politeness he draws down before us 
an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another 
behind us of purest sky. 'You will not remember,' 
he seems to say, 'and you will not expect.' 40 All good 
conversation, manners and action come from a spon- 
taneity which forgets usages and makes the moment 
great. Nature hates calculators; her methods are 
saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our 
organic movements are such; and the chemical and 
ethereal agents are undulatory and alternate; and the 
mind goes antagonizing on, and never prospers but 
by fits. We thrive by casualties. Our chief experi- 
ences have been casual. The most attractive class of 
people are those who are powerful obliquely and not 
by the direct stroke; men of genius, but not yet accred- 
ited; one gets the cheer of their light without paying 
too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird or 
the morning light, and not of art. In the thought of 
genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sen- 
timent is well called "the newness," for it is never 
other ; as new to the oldest intelligence as to the young 
child; — "the kingdom that cometh without obser- 
vation." In like manner, for practical success, there 
must not be too much design. A man will not be 
observed in doing that which he can do best. There 
is a certain magic about his properest action which 
stupefies your powers of observation, so that though 
it is done before you, vou wist not of it. The art of 



48 ESSAYS 

life has a pudency, and will not be exposed. Every- 
man is an impossibility until he is born; every thing 
impossible until we see a success. The ardors of piety 
agree at last with the coldest scepticism, — that nothing 
is of us or our works, — that all is of God. Nature 
will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing 
comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. 
I would gladly be moral and keep due metes and 
bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to 
the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty 
in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in suc- 
cess or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied 
from the Eternal. The results of life are uncalculated 
and uncalculable. The years teach much which the 
days never know. The persons who compose our 
company converse, and come and go, and design and 
execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, 
but an unlooked-for result. The individual is always 
mistaken. 41 He designed many things, and drew in 
other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or 
all, blundered much, and something is done; all are 
a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. 
It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he 
promised himself. 

The ancients, struck with this irreducibleness of 
the elements of human life to calculation, exalted 
Chance into a divinity; but that is to stay too long at 
the spark, which glitters truly at one point, but the 
universe is warm with the latency of the same fire. 
The miracle of life which will not be expounded but 
will remain a miracle, introduces a new element. In 
the growth of the embryo, Sir Everard Home, 42 1 think, 
noticed that the evolution was not from one central 



EXPERIENCE 49 

point, but coactive from three or more points. Life 
has no memory. That which proceeds in succession 
might be remembered, but that which is coexistent, 
or ejaculated from a deeper cause, as yet far from 
being conscious, knows not its own tendency. So is it 
with us, now sceptical or without unity, because im- 
mersed in forms and effects all seeming to be of equal 
yet hostile value, and now religious, whilst in the re- 
ception of spiritual law. Bear with these distractions, 
with this coetaneous growth of the parts; they will 
one day be members, and obey one will. On that one 
will, on that secret cause, they nail our attention and 
hope. Life is hereby melted into an expectation or 
a religion. Underneath the inharmonious and trivial 
particulars, is a musical perfection ; the Ideal journey- 
ing always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. 
Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When 
I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time 
being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once 
arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink 
water; or go to the fire, being cold; no! but I am at 
first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent 
region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this 
region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes 
of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty 
and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at 
intervals and showed the approaching traveller the 
inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows 
spread at their base, whereon flocks graze and shep- 
herds pipe and dance. But every insight from this 
realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. 
I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was 
there already. I make! O no! I clap my hands in 
infantine joy and amazement before the first opening 



50 ESSAYS 

to me of this august magnificence, old with the love 
and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life 
of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. 43 And what 
a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the 
love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature 
and be born again into this new yet unapproachable 
America I have found in the West: — 

" Since neither now nor yesterday began 
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can 
A man be found who their first entrance knew." 44 

If I have described life as a flux of moods, I must now 
add that there is that in us which changes not and 
which ranks all sensations and states of mind. The 
consciousness in each man is a sliding scale, which 
identifies him now with the First Cause, and now with 
the flesh of his body; life above life, in infinite degrees. 
The sentiment from which it sprung determines the 
dignity of any deed, and the question ever is, not what 
you have done or forborne, but at whose command 
you have done or forborne it. 

Fortune, Minerva, Muse, Holy Ghost, — these are 
quaint names, too narrow to cover this unbounded sub- 
stance. The baffled intellect must still kneel before 
this cause, which refuses to be named, — ineffable 
cause, which every fine genius has essayed to represent 
by some emphatic symbol, as, Thales by water, 45 An- 
aximenes by air, Anaxagoras 46 by (Nous) thought, 
Zoroaster 47 by fire, Jesus and the moderns by love; 
and the metaphor of each has become a national 
religion. The Chinese Mencius 48 has not been the 
least successful in his generalization. "I fully un- 
derstand language," he said, "and nourish well my 
vast flowing vigor." — "I beg to ask what you call 
vast flowing vigor ? " said his companion. " The expla- 



EXPERIENCE 51 

nation," replied Mencius, " is difficult. This vigor is 
supremely great, and in the highest degree unbend- 
ing. Nourish it correctly and do it no injury, and it will 
fill up the vacancy between heaven and earth. This 
vigor accords with and assists justice and reason, and 
leaves no hunger." — In our more correct writing 
we give to this generalization the name of Being, and 
thereby confess that we have arrived as far as we can 
go. Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we have 
not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. 
Our life seems not present so much as prospective; 
not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint 
of this vast-flowing vigor. Most of life seems to be 
mere advertisement of faculty; information is given 
us not to sell ourselves cheap; that we are very great. 
So, in particulars, our greatness is always in a tend- 
ency or direction, not in an action. It is for us to believe 
in the rule, not in the exception. The noble are thus 
known from the ignoble. So in accepting the leading 
of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning 
the immortality of the soul or the like, but the universal 
impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance 
and is the principal fact in the history of the globe. 
Shall we describe this cause as that which works 
directly? The spirit is not helpless or needful of 
mediate organs. It has plentiful powers and direct 
effects. I am explained without explaining, I am felt 
without acting, and where I am not. Therefore all 
just persons are satisfied with their own praise. They 
refuse to explain themselves, and are content that 
new actions should do them that office. They be- 
lieve that we communicate without speech and above 
speech, and that no right action of ours is quite un- 
affecting to our friends, at whatever distance; for the 



52 ESS A YS 

influence of action is not to be measured by miles. 
Why should I fret myself because a circumstance has 
occurred which hinders my presence where I was 
expected ? If I am not at the meeting, my presence 
where I am should be as useful to the commonwealth 
of friendship and wisdom, as would be my presence 
in that place. I exert the same quality of power in 
all places. Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before 
us; it never was known to fall into the rear. No 
man ever came to an experience which was satiating, 
but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and on- 
ward! In liberated moments we know that a new 
picture of life and duty is already possible; the ele- 
ments already exist in many minds around you of a 
doctrine of life which shall transcend any written re- 
cord we have. The new statement will comprise the 
scepticisms as w T ell as the faiths of society, and out 
of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For scepticisms 
are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of 
the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy 
must take them in and make affirmations outside 
of them, just as much as it must include the oldest 
beliefs. 

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the 
discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery 
is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect 
our instruments. We have learned that we do not see 
directly, but mediately, and that we have no means 
of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which 
we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. 
Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; 
perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what 
we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, 



EXPERIENCE 53 

which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. 
Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects, suc- 
cessively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. 
Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; 
every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we 
cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. 
As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery 
and make them wait on his guests at table, so the 
chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at 
once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, 
shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and threaten or 
insult whatever is threatenable and insultable in us. 
? T is the same with our idolatries. People forget that 
it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the round- 
ing mind's eye which makes this or that man a type 
or representative of humanity, with the name of hero 
or saint. Jesus, the "providential man," is a good 
man on whom many people are agreed that these 
optical laws shall take effect. By love on one part 
and by forbearance to press objection on the other 
part, it is for a time settled that we will look at him in 
the centre of the horizon, and ascribe to him the pro- 
perties that will attach to any man so seen. But the 
longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great 
and crescive self, 49 rooted in absolute nature, supplants 
all relative existence and ruins the kingdom of mortal 
friendship and love. Marriage (in what is called the 
spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequal- 
ity between every subject and every object. The sub- 
ject is the receiver of Godhead, and at every compari- 
son must feel his being enhanced by that cryptic might. 
Though not in energy, yet by presence, this magazine 
of substance cannot be otherwise than felt; nor can 
any force of intellect attribute to the object the proper 



54 ESS A YS 

deity which sleeps or wakes forever in every subject. 
Never can love make consciousness and ascription 
equal in force. There will be the same gulf between 
every me and thee as between the original and the 
picture. The universe is the bride of the soul. All 
private sympathy is partial. Two human beings are 
like globes, which can touch only in a point, and whilst 
they remain in contact all other points of each of the 
spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the 
longer a particular union lasts the more energy of 
appetency the parts not in union acquire. 

Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor 
doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos. 
The soul is not twin-born but the only begotten, and 
though revealing itself as child in time, child in ap- 
pearance, is of a fatal and universal power, admitting 
no co-life. Every day, every act betrays the ill-con- 
cealed deity. We believe in ourselves as we do not be- 
lieve in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and 
that which we call sin in others is experiment for us. 
It is an instance of our faith in ourselves that men 
never speak of crime as lightly as they think; or every 
man thinks a latitude safe for himself which is nowise 
to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently 
on the inside and on the outside; in its quality and 
in its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no 
such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have 
it ; it does not unsettle him or fright him from his 
ordinary notice of trifles ; it is an act quite easy to be 
contemplated ; but in its sequel it turns out to be a hor- 
rible jangle and confounding of all relations. Especially 
the crimes that spring from love seem right and fair 
from the actor's point of view, but when acted are 
found destructive of society. No man at last believes 



EXPERIENCE 55 

that he can be lost, or that the crime in him is as black 
as in the felon. Because the intellect qualifies in our 
own case the moral judgments. For there is no crime 
to the intellect. That is antinomian or hypernomian, 50 
and judges law as well as fact. "It is worse than a 
crime, it is a blunder," said Napoleon, speaking the 
language of the intellect. To it, the world is a prob- 
lem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it 
leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. 
All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, 
pray who does not steal ? Saints are sad, because they 
behold sin (even when they speculate) from the point 
of view of the conscience, and not of the intellect; a 
confusion of thought. Sin, seen from the thought, is 
a diminution, or less ; seen from the conscience or 
will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it shade, 
absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must 
feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not; it has 
an objective existence, but no subjective. 

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, 
and every object fall successively into the subject 
itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all 
things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I 
see; use what language we will, we can never say 
anything but what we are; Hermes, Cadmus, Colum- 
bus, Newton, Bonaparte, 51 are the mind's ministers. 
Instead of feeling a poverty when we encounter a great 
man, let us treat the new-comer like a travelling geo- 
logist who passes through our estate and shows us 
good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush 
pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in 
one direction is a telescope for the objects on which 
it is pointed. But every other part of knowledge is to 
be pushed to the same extravagance, ere the soul at- 



56 ESSAYS 

tains her due sphericity. Do you see that kitten chas- 
ing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with 
her eyes you might see her surrounded with hundreds 
of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic 
and comic issues, long conversations, many charac- 
ters, many ups and downs of fate, — and meantime 
it is only puss and her tail. How long before our mas- 
querade will end its noise of tambourines, laughter 
and shouting, and we shall find it was a solitary per- 
formance ? A subject and an object, — it takes so 
much to make the galvanic circuit complete, but 
magnitude adds nothing. What imports it whether it 
is Kepler and the sphere, 52 Columbus and America, 
a reader and his book, or puss with her tail ? 

It is true that all the muses and love and religion 
hate these developments, and will find a way to punish 
the chemist who publishes in the parlor the secrets 
of the laboratory. And we cannot say too little of our 
constitutional necessity of seeing things under private 
aspects, or saturated with our humors. And yet is the 
God the native of these bleak rocks. That need makes 
in morals the capital virtue of self -trust. We must 
hold hard to this poverty, however scandalous, and 
by more vigorous self -recoveries, after the sallies of 
action, possess our axis more firmly. The life of truth 
is cold and so far mournful; but it is not the slave 
of tears, contritions and perturbations. It does not 
attempt another's work, nor adopt another's facts. It 
is a main lesson of wisdom to know your own from 
another's. I have learned that I cannot dispose of 
other people's facts; but I possess such a key to my 
own as persuades me, against all their denials, that 
they also have a key to theirs. A sympathetic person 
is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drown- 



EXPERIENCE 57 

ing men, who all catch at him, and if he give so much 
as a leg or a finger they will drown him. They wish 
to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not 
from their vices. Charity would be wasted on this 
poor waiting on the symptoms. A wise and hardy 
physician will say, Come out of that, as the first con- 
dition of advice. 

In this our talking America we are ruined by our 
good nature and listening on all sides. This com- 
pliance takes away the power of being greatly useful. 
A man should not be able to look other than directly 
and forthright. A preoccupied attention is the only 
answer to the importunate frivolity of other people; 
an attention, and to an aim which makes their wants 
frivolous. This is a divine answer, and leaves no ap- 
peal and no hard thoughts. In Flaxman's drawing 53 
of the Eumenides of iEschylus, Orestes supplicates 
Apollo, whilst the Furies sleep on the threshold. The 
face of the god expresses a shade of regret and com- 
passion, but is calm with the conviction of the irre- 
concilableness of the two spheres. He is born into 
other politics, into the eternal and beautiful. The 
man at his feet asks for his interest in turmoils of 
the earth, into which his nature cannot enter. And 
the Eumenides there lying express pictorially this 
disparity. The god is surcharged with his divine des- 
tiny. 

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Sur- 
prise, Reality, Subjectiveness, 54 — these are threads 
on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare 
not assume to give their order, but I name them as I 
find them in my way. I know better than to claim 
any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, 



58 ESSAYS 

and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently 
announce one or another law, which throws itself into 
relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages 
to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning 
the eternal politics. I have seen many fair pictures 
not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am 
not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. 
Let who will ask, Where is the fruit ? I find a private 
fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, —that I should not 
ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels and 
the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand 
a result on this town and county, an overt effect on 
the instant month and year. The effect is deep and 
secular as the cause. It works on periods in which 
mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception; I am 
and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied 
I had gotten anything, I found I did not. I worship 
with wonder the great Fortune. My reception has 
been so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this 
or that superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he 
will pardon the proverb, In for a mill, in for a million. 
When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body 
to make the account square, for if I should die I could 
not make the account square. The benefit overran 
the merit the first day, and has overrun the merit ever 
since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the 
receiving. 

Also that hankering after an overt or practical effect 
seems to me an apostasy. In good earnest I am willing 
to spare this most unnecessary deal of doing. Life 
wears to me a visionary face. Hardest roughest action 
is visionary also. It is but a choice between soft and 
turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing and 
the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am very content 



EXPERIENCE 59 

with knowing, if only I could know. That is an august 
entertainment, and would suffice me a great while. 
To know a little would be worth the expense of this 
world. I hear always the law of Adrastia, 55 " that every 
soul which had acquired any truth, should be safe 
from harm until another period." 

I know that the world I converse with in the city 
and in the farms, is not the world I think. I observe 
that difference, and shall observe it. One day I shall 
know the value and law of this discrepance. But I 
have not found that much was gained by manipular 
attempts to realize the world of thought. Many eager 
persons successively make an experiment in this way, 
and make themselves ridiculous. They acquire demo- 
cratic manners, they foam at the mouth, they hate 
and deny. Worse, I observe that in the history of 
mankind there is never a solitary example of success, 
— taking their own tests of success. I say this polemi- 
cally, or in reply to the inquiry, Why not realize your 
world? But far be from me the despair which pre- 
judges the law by a paltry empiricism; — since there 
never was a right endeavor but it succeeded. Patience 
and patience, we shall win at the last. We must be 
very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of 
time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, 
or to earn a hundred dollars, and a very little time to 
entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the 
light of our life. We dress our garden, eat our dinners, 
discuss the household with our wives, and these things 
make no impression, are forgotten next week; but, 
in the solitude to which every man is always return- 
ing, he has a sanity and revelations which in his pas- 
sage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never 
mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat; up again, 



60 ESSAYS 

old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet 
for all justice; and the true romance which the world 
exists to realize will be the transformation of genius 
into practical power. 



CHARACTER 

The sun set; but set not his hope: 
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up: 
Fixed on the enormous galaxy, 
Deeper and older seemed his eye: 
And matched his sufferance sublime 
The taciturnity of time. 
He spoke, and words more soft than rain 
Brought the Age of Gold again: 
His action won such reverence sweet, 
As hid all measure of the feat. 



Work of his hand 

He nor commends nor grieves: 

Pleads for itself the fact; 

As unrepenting Nature leaves 

Her every act. 



CHARACTER 

I have read that those who listened to Lord Chat- 
ham 1 felt that there was something finer in the man 
than anything which he said. It has been complained 
of our brilliant English historian 2 of the French Revo- 
lution that when he has told all his facts about Mira- 
beau, 3 they do not justify his estimate of his genius. 
The Gracchi, 4 Agis, 5 Cleomenes, 6 and others of Plu- 
tarch's 7 heroes, do not in the record of facts equal their 
own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, 8 the Earl of Essex, 9 Sir 
Walter Raleigh, 10 are men of great figure and of few 
deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the per- 
sonal weight of Washington in the narrative of his ex- 
ploits. The authority of the name of Schiller u is too 
great for his books. This inequality of the reputation 
to the works or the anecdotes is not accounted for by 
saying that the reverberation is longer than the thun- 
der-clap, but somewhat resided in these men which 
begot an expectation that outran all their performance. 
The largest part of their power was latent. This is that 
which we call — Character, a reserved force, which acts 
directly by presence and without means. It is con- 
ceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a Familiar 
or Genius, 12 by whose impulses the man is guided, 
but whose counsels he cannot impart; which is com- 
pany for him, so that such men are often solitary, or 
if they chance to be social, do not need society but can 
entertain themselves very well alone. The purest lit- 
erary talent appears at one time great, at another time 
small, but character is of a stellar and undiminishable 



64 ESS A YS 

greatness. What others effect by talent or by eloquence, 
this man accomplishes by some magnetism. "Half 
his strength he put not forth." His victories are by 
demonstration of superiority, and not by crossing of 
bayonets. He conquers because his arrival alters the 
face of affairs. " O Iole! how did you know that Her- 
cules was a god?" 13 "Because," answered Iole, "I 
was content the moment my eyes fell on him. When 
I beheld Theseus, I desired that I might see him offer 
battle, or at least guide his horses in the chariot-race; 
but Hercules did not wait for a contest; he conquered 
whether he stood, or walked, or sat, or whatever thing 
he did." Man, ordinarily a pendant to events, only 
half attached, and that awkwardly, to the world he 
lives in, in these examples appears to share the life of 
things, and to be an expression of the same laws which 
control the tides and the sun, numbers and quantities. 

But to use a more modest illustration and nearer 
home, I observe that in our political elections, where 
this element, if it appears at all, can only occur in its 
coarsest form, we sufficiently understand its incom- 
parable rate. The people know that they need in their 
representative much more than talent, namely the 
power to make his talent trusted. They cannot come 
at their ends by sending to Congress a learned, acute 
and fluent speaker, 14 if he be not one who, before he 
was appointed by the people to represent them, was 
appointed by Almighty God to stand for a fact, 15 — 
invincibly persuaded of that fact in himself, — so that 
the most confident and the most violent persons learn 
that here is resistance on which both impudence and 
terror are wasted, namely faith in a fact. The men 
who carry their points do not need to inquire of their 
constituents what they should say, but are themselves 



CHARACTER 65 

the country which they represent; nowhere are its 
emotions or opinions so instant and true as in them; 
nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion. The consti- 
tuency at home hearkens to their words, watches the 
color of their cheek, and therein, as in a glass, dresses 
its own. Our public assemblies are pretty good tests 
of manly force. Our frank countrymen of the west 
and south have a taste for character, and like to know 
whether the New Englander is a substantial man, or 
whether the hand can pass through him. 

The same motive force appears in trade. There are 
geniuses in trade, as well as in war, or the State, or 
letters ; and the reason why this or that man is fortu- 
nate is not to be told . It lies in the man ; that is all any- 
body can tell you about it. See him and you will know 
as easily why he succeeds, as, if you see Napoleon, you 
would comprehend his fortune. In the new objects 
we recognize the old game, the habit of fronting the 
fact, and not dealing with it at second hand, 16 through 
the perceptions of somebody else. Nature seems to 
authorize trade, as soon as you see the natural mer- 
chant, who appears not so much a private agent as her 
factor and Minister of Commerce. His natural probity 
combines with his insight into the fabric of society to 
put him above tricks, and he communicates to all his 
own faith that contracts are of no private interpreta- 
tion.. The habit of his mind is a reference to standards 
of natural equity and public advantage; and he in- 
spires respect and the wish to deal with him, both for 
the quiet spirit of honor which attends him, and for 
the intellectual pastime which the spectacle of so much 
ability affords. This immensely stretched trade, 17 
which makes the capes of the Southern Ocean his 
wharves and the Atlantic Sea his familiar port, centres 



66 ESSAYS 

in his brain only; and nobody in the universe can 
make his place good. In his parlor I see very well that 
he has been at hard work this morning, with that 
knitted brow and that settled humor, which all his 
desire to be courteous cannot shake off. I see plainly 
how many firm acts have been done ; how many valiant 
noes have this day been spoken, when others would 
have uttered ruinous yeas. I see, with the pride of 
art and skill of masterly arithmetic and power of 
remote combination, the consciousness of being an 
agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world. 
He too believes that none can supply him, and that 
a man must be born to trade or he cannot learn it. 

This virtue draws the mind more when it appears 
in action to ends not so mixed. It works with most 
energy in the smallest companies and in private rela- 
tions. In all cases it is an extraordinary and incom- 
putable agent. The excess of physical strength is par- 
alyzed by it. Higher natures overpower lower ones 
by affecting them with a certain sleep. 18 The faculties 
are locked up, and offer no resistance. Perhaps that 
is the universal law. When the high cannot bring up 
the low to itself, it benumbs it, as man charms down 
the resistance of the lower animals. Men exert on 
each other a similar occult power. How often has the 
influence of a true master realized all the tales of 
magic ! A river of command seemed to rUn down from 
his eyes into all those who beheld him, a torrent of 
strong sad light, like an Ohio or Danube, which per- 
vaded them with his thoughts and colored all events 
with the hue of his mind. "What means did you 
employ ?y was the question asked of the wife of Con- 
cini, 19 in regard to her treatment of Mary of Medici; 
and the answer was, " Only that influence which every 



CHARACTER 67 

strong mind has over a weak one." Cannot Caesar in 
irons shuffle off the irons and transfer them to the 
person of Hippo or Thraso 20 the turnkey ? Is an iron 
handcuff so immutable a bond ? Suppose a slaver on 
the coast of Guinea should take on board a gang of 
negroes which should contain persons of the stamp 
of Toussaint L'Ouverture: 21 or, let us fancy, under 
these swarthy masks he has a gang of Washingtons 
in chains. When they arrive at Cuba, will the relative 
order of the ship's company be the same? Is there 
nothing but rope and iron ? Is there no love, no rev- 
erence? Is there never a glimpse of right in a poor 
slave-captain's mind; and cannot these be supposed 
available to break or elude or in any manner over- 
match the tension of an inch or two of iron ring? 

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all 
nature cooperates with it. The reason why we feel 
one man's presence and do not feel another's is as 
simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being; jus- 
tice is the application of it to affairs. All individual 
natures stand in a scale, according to the purity of 
this element in them. The will of the pure runs down 
from them into other natures, as water runs down 
from a higher into a lower vessel. This natural force 
is no more to be withstood than any other natural 
force. We can drive a stone upward for a moment 
into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will forever 
fall; and whatever instances can be quoted of un- 
punished theft, or of a lie which somebody credited, 
justice must prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to 
make itself believed. Character is this moral order 
seen through the medium of an individual nature. 
An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty 
and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no 



68 ESS A YS 

longer. Now, the universe is a close or pound. All 
things exist in the man tinged with the manners of 
his soul. With what quality is in him he infuses all 
nature that he can reach; nor does he tend to lose 
himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever, 
all his regards return into his own good at last. 22 He 
animates all he can, and he sees only what he animates. 
He encloses the world, as the patriot does his country, 
as a material basis for his character, and a theatre 
for action. A healthy soul stands united with the Just 
and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the 
pole; so that he stands to all beholders like a trans- 
parent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso 
journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that per- 
son. He is thus the medium of the highest influence 
to all who are not on the same level. Thus men of 
character are the conscience of the society to which 
they belong. 23 

The natural measure of this power is the resistance 
of circumstances. Impure men consider life as it is 
reflected in opinions, events and persons. They can- 
not see the action until it is done. Yet its moral ele- 
ment preexisted in the actor, and its quality as right 
or wrong it was easy to predict. Everything in nature 
is bipolar, or has a, positive and a negative pole. There 
is a male and a female, a spirit and a fact, a north 
and a south. Spirit is the positive, the event is the 
negative. Will is the north, action the south pole. 
Character may be ranked as having its natural place 
in the north. It shares the magnetic currents of the 
system. The feeble souls are drawn to the south or 
negative pole. They look at the profit or hurt of the 
action. They never behold a principle until it is lodged 
in a person. They do not wish to be lovely, but to 



CHARACTER 69 

be loved. Men of character like to hear of their faults; 
the other class do not like to hear of faults; they 
worship events; secure to them a fact, a connection, 
a certain chain of circumstances, and they will ask 
no more. The hero sees that the event is ancillary; 24 
it must follow him. A given order of events has no 
power to secure to him the satisfaction which the 
imagination, attaches to it; the soul of goodness es- 
capes from any set of circumstances ; whilst prosperity 
belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce that 
power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any 
order of events. No change of circumstances can re- 
pair a defect of character. We boast our emancipa- 
tion from many superstitions; but if we have broken 
any idols it is through a transfer of the idolatry. What 
have I gained, that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove 
or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not 
tremble before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Pur- 
gatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment-day, — if I quake 
at opinion, the public opinion as we call it; or at the 
threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbors, or 
poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumor of revolution, 
or of murder ? If I quake, what matters it what I quake 
at ? 25 Our proper vice takes form in one or another 
shape, according to the sex, age, or temperament of 
the person, and, if we are capable of fear, will readily 
find terrors. The covetousness or the malignity which 
saddens me when I ascribe it to society, is my own. I 
am always environed by myself. On the other part, 
rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries 
of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual. It 
is disgraceful to fly to events for confirmation of our 
truth and worth. The capitalist does not run every 
hour to the broker to coin his advantages into current 



70 ESSAYS 

money of the realm; he is satisfied to read in the quo- 
tations of the market that his stocks have risen. The 
same transport which the occurrence of the best events 
in the best order would occasion me, I must learn to 
taste purer in the perception that my position is every 
hour meliorated, and does already command those 
events I desire. That exultation is only to be checked 
by the foresight of an order of things so excellent as to 
throw all our prosperities into the deepest shade. 

The face which character wears to me is self-suffi- 
cingness. I revere the person who is riches; so that I 
cannot think of him as alone, or poor, or exiled, or 
unhappy, or a client, but as perpetual patron, bene- 
factor and beatified man. Character is centrality, the 
impossibility of being displaced or overset. A man 
should give us a sense of mass. Society is frivolous, 
and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into 
ceremonies and escapes. But if I go to see an inge- 
nious man I shall think myself poorly entertained if 
he give me nimble pieces of benevolence and etiquette; 
rather he shall stand stoutly in his place and let me 
apprehend, if it were only his resistance; know that 
I have encountered a new and positive quality; — 
great refreshment for both of us. It is much that he 
does not accept the conventional opinions and prac- 
tices. That non-conformity will remain a goad and 
remembrancer, and every inquirer will have to dis- 
pose of him, in the first place. There is nothing real 
or useful that is not a seat of war. Our houses ring 
with laughter and personal and critical gossip, but it 
helps little. But the uncivil, unavailable man, who is 
a problem and a threat to society, whom it cannot let 
pass in silence but must either worship or hate, — and 
to whom all parties feel related, both the leaders of 



CHARACTER 71 

opinion and the obscure and eccentric, — he helps ; 
he puts America and Europe in the wrong, and de- 
stroys the scepticism which says, ' Man is a doll, 26 let 
us eat and drink, 't is the best we can do,' by illumi- 
nating the untried and unknown. Acquiescence in the 
establishment and appeal to the public, indicate infirm 
faith, heads which are not clear, and which must see 
a house built before they can comprehend the plan of 
it. The wise man not only leaves out of his thought 
the many, but leaves out the few. Fountains, the 
self -moved, the absorbed, the commander because he 
is commanded, the assured, the primary, — they are 
good; for these announce the instant presence of su- 
preme power. 

Our action should rest mathematically on our sub- 
stance. In nature there are no false valuations. A 
pound of water in the ocean-tempest has no more 
gravity than in a midsummer pond. All things work 
exactly according to their quality and according to 
their quantity; attempt nothing they cannot do, ex- 
cept man only. He has pretension; he wishes and 
attempts things beyond his force. I read in a book of 
English memoirs, "Mr. Fox (afterwards Lord Hol- 
land) said, he must have the Treasury; he had served 
up to it, and would have it." Xenophon and his Ten 
Thousand were quite equal to what they attempted, 
and did it; so equal, that it was not suspected to be a 
grand and inimitable exploit. Yet there stands that 
fact unrepeated, a high -water mark in military history. 
Many have attempted it since, and not been equal to 
it. It is only on reality that any power of action can 
be based. No institution will be better than the insti- 
tutor. I knew an amiable and accomplished person 27 
who undertook a practical reform, yet I was never 



72 ESSA YS 

able to find in him the enterprise of love he took in 
hand. He adopted it by ear and by the understand- 
ing from the books he had been reading. All his ac- 
tion was tentative, a piece of the city carried out into 
the fields, and was the city still, and no new fact, 28 and 
could not inspire enthusiasm. Had there been some- 
thing latent in the man, a terrible undemonstrated 
genius agitating and embarrassing his demeanor, we 
had watched for its advent. It is not enough that the 
intellect should see the evils and their remedy. We 
shall still postpone our existence, nor take the ground 
to which we are entitled, whilst it is only a thought 
and not a spirit that incites us. We have not yet served 
up to it. 

These are properties of life, and another trait is the 
notice of incessant growth. Men should be intelligent 
and earnest. They must also make us feel that they 
have a controlling happy future opening before them, 
whose early twilights already kindle in the passing 
hour. The hero is misconceived and misreported ; 29 
he cannot therefore wait to unravel any man's blunders; 
he is again on his road, adding new powers and hon- 
ors to his domain and new claims on your heart, which 
will bankrupt you if you have loitered about the old 
things and have not kept your relation to him by add- 
ing to your wealth. New actions are the only apolo- 
gies and explanations of old ones which the noble can 
bear to offer or to receive. If your friend has displeased 
you, you shall not sit down to consider it, for he has 
already lost all memory of the passage, and has doubled 
his power to serve you, and ere you can rise up again 
will burden you with blessings. 

We have no pleasure in thinking of a benevolence 
that is only measured by its works. Love is inexhaust- 



CHARACTER 73 

ible, and if its estate is wasted, its granary emptied, 
still cheers and enriches, and the man, though he sleep, 
seems to purify the air and his house to adorn the land- 
scape and strengthen the laws. People always recog- 
nize this difference. We know who is benevolent, by 
quite other means than the amount of subscription 
to soup-societies. It is only low merits that can be 
enumerated. Fear, when your friends say to you what 
you have done well, and say it through; but when 
they stand with uncertain timid looks of respect and 
half-dislike, and must suspend their judgment for 
years to come, you may begin to hope. 30 Those who 
live to the future must always appear selfish to those 
who live to the present. Therefore it was droll in the 
good Riemer, who has written memoirs of Goethe, to 
make out a list of his donations and good deeds, as, so 
many hundred thalers given to Stilling, to Hegel, to 
Tischbein; a lucrative place found for Professor Voss, 
a post under the Grand Duke for Herder, a pension 
for Meyer, two professors recommended to foreign 
universities; etc., etc. The longest list of specifica- 
tions of benefit would look very short. A man is a poor 
creature if he is to be measured so. For all these of 
course are exceptions, and the rule and hodiurnal life 
of a good man is benefaction. The true charity of 
Goethe is to be inferred from the account he gave Dr. 
Eckermann of the way in which he had spent his for- 
tune. " Each bon mot of mine has cost a purse of gold. 
Half a million of my own money, the fortune I inher- 
ited, my salary and the large income derived from 
my writings for fifty years back, have been expended 
to instruct me in what I now know. I have besides 
seen," etc. 

I own it is but poor chat and gossip to go to enu- 



74 ESS A YS 

merate traits of this simple and rapid power, and we 
are painting the lightning with charcoal; but in these 
long nights and vacations I like to console myself so. 
Nothing but itself can copy it. A word warm from 
the heart enriches me. I surrender at discretion. 31 
How death-cold is literary genius before this fire of 
life! These are the touches that reanimate my heavy 
soul and give it eyes to pierce the dark of nature. I 
find, where I thought myself poor, there was I most 
rich. Thence comes a new intellectual exaltation, to 
be again rebuked by some new exhibition of charac- 
ter. Strange alternation of attraction and repulsion! 
Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it ; and char- 
acter passes into thought, is published so, and then 
is ashamed before new flashes of moral worth. 

Character is nature in the highest form. It is of no 
use to ape it or to contend with it. Somewhat is possi- 
ble of resistance, and of persistence, and of creation, 
to this power, which will foil all emulation. 

This masterpiece is best where no hands but nature's 
have been laid on it. Care is taken that the greatly- 
destined shall slip up into life in the shade, with no 
thousand-eyed Athens 32 to watch and blazon every 
new thought, every blushing emotion of young ge- 
nius. Two persons lately, very young children of the 
most high God, have given me occasion for thought. 
When I explored the source of their sanctity and charm 
for the imagination, it seemed as if each answered, 
'From my non-conformity; I never listened to your 
people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and 
wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural 
poverty of my own; hence this sweetness; my work 
never reminds you of that, — is pure of that.' And 
nature advertises me in such persons that in demo- 



CHARACTER 75 

cratic America she will not be democratized. How 
cloistered and constitutionally sequestered from the 
market and from scandal! It was only this morning 
that I sent away some wild flowers of these wood-gods. 
They are a relief from literature, — these fresh draughts 
from the sources of thought and sentiment; as we 
read, in an age of polish and criticism, the first lines 
of written prose and verse of a nation. How captivat- 
ing is their devotion to their favorite books, whether 
iEschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, or Scott, as feeling that 
they have a stake in that book; who touches that, 
touches them, — and especially the total solitude of the 
critic, the Patmos of thought 33 from which he writes, 
in unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever read 
this writing. Could they dream on still, as angels, and 
not wake to comparisons and to be flattered ! Yet some 
natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wher- 
ever the vein of thought reaches down into the pro- 
found, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends 
will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned 
by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile. 
I remember the indignation of an eloquent Method- 
ist 34 at the kind admonitions of a Doctor of Divinity, 
— 'My friend, a man can neither be praised nor in- 
sulted.' But forgive the counsels; they are very nat- 
ural. I remember the thought which occurred to me 
when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners 35 came 
to America, was, Have you been victimized in being 
brought hither ? — or, prior to that, answer me this, 
' Are you victimizable ? ' 

As I have said, Nature keeps these sovereignties 
in her own hands, and however pertly our sermons 
and disciplines would divide some share of credit, and 
teach that the laws fashion the citizen, she goes her 



76 ESSA YS 

own gait and puts the wisest in the wrong. She makes 
very light of gospels and prophets, as one who has a 
great many more to produce and no excess of time to 
spare on any one. There is a class of men, individu- 
als of which appear at long intervals, so eminently 
endowed with insight and virtue that they have been 
unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem to be 
an accumulation of that power we consider. Divine 
persons are character born, or, to borrow a phrase 
from Napoleon, they are victory organized. They are 
usually received with ill-will, because they are new 
and because they set a bound to the exaggeration that 
has been made of the personality of the last divine 
person. Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes 
two men alike. When we see a great man we fancy a 
resemblance to some historical person, and predict 
the sequel of his character and fortune ; a result which 
he is sure to disappoint. None will ever solve the prob- 
lem of his character according to our prejudice, but 
only in his own high unprecedented way. Character 
wants room; must not be crowded on by persons nor 
be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs 
or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great 
building. It may not, probably does not, form rela- 
tions rapidly; and we should not require rash expla- 
nation, either on the popular ethics, or on our own, 
of its action. 

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the 
Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. 
Every trait which the artist recorded in stone he had 
seen in life, and better than his copy. We have seen 
many counterfeits, but we are born believers in great 
men. 36 How easily we read in old books, when men 
were few, of the smallest action of the patriarchs. We 



CHARACTER 77 

require that a man should be so large and columnar 
in the landscape, that it should deserve to be recorded 
that he arose, and girded up his loins, and departed 
to such a place. The most credible pictures are those 
of majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and 
convinced the senses; as happened to the eastern 
magian who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht or 
Zoroaster. " When the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, 
the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on 
which the Mobeds of every country should assemble, 
and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani sage. 
Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, 
advanced into the midst of the assembly. The Yu- 
nani sage, on seeing that chief, said, 'This form and 
this gait cannot lie, and nothing but truth can pro- 
ceed from them.'" 37 Plato said it was impossible not 
to believe in the children of the gods, "though they 
should speak without probable or necessary argu- 
ments." 38 I should think myself very unhappy in my 
associates if I could not credit the best things in his- 
tory. " John Bradshaw," says Milton, 39 " appears like 
a consul, from whom the fasces are not to depart with 
the year; so that not on the tribunal only, but through- 
out his life, you would regard him as sitting in judg- 
ment upon kings." I find it more credible, since it is 
anterior information, that one man should know heaven, 
as the Chinese say, than that so many men should 
know the world. "The virtuous prince confronts the 
gods, without any misgiving. He waits a hundred 
ages till a sage comes, and does not doubt. He who 
confronts the gods, without any misgiving, knows 
heaven; he who waits a hundred ages until a sage 
comes, without doubting, knows men. Hence the vir- 
tuous prince moves, and for ages shows empire the 



78 ESSAYS 

way." But there is no need to seek remote examples. 
He is a dull observer whose experience has not taught 
him the reality and force of magic, as well as of chem- 
istry. The coldest precisian cannot go abroad without 
encountering inexplicable influences. One man fas- 
tens an eye on him and the graves of the memory ren- 
der up their dead ; the secrets that make him wretched 
either to keep or to betray must be yielded ; — another, 
and he cannot speak, and the bones of his body seem 
to lose their cartilages; the entrance of a friend adds 
grace, boldness and eloquence to him; and there are 
persons he cannot choose but remember, who gave 
a transcendent expansion to his thought, and kindled 
another life in his bosom. 

What is so excellent as strict relations of amity, when 
they spring from this deep root ? The sufficient reply 
to the sceptic who doubts the power and the furniture 40 
of man, is in that possibility of joyful intercourse 
with persons, which makes the faith and practice of 
all reasonable men. I know nothing which life has to 
offer so satisfying as the profound good understand- 
ing which can subsist, after much exchange of good 
offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is 
sure of himself and sure of his friend. It is a hap- 
piness which postpones all other gratifications, and 
makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap. 
For when men shall meet as they ought, each a bene- 
factor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with 
deeds, with accomplishments, it should be the festival 
of nature which all things announce. Of such friend- 
ship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other 
things are symbols of love. Those relations to the best 
men, which, at one time, we reckoned the romances 
of youth, become, in the progress of the character, the 
most solid enjoyment. 



CHARACTER 79 

If It were possible to live in right relations with men ! 
— if we could abstain from asking anything of them, 
from asking their praise, or help, or pity, and content 
us with compelling them through the virtue of the 
eldest laws ! Could we not deal with a few persons, — 
with one person, — after the unwritten statutes, and 
make an experiment of their efficacy ? Could we not 
pay our friend the compliment of truth, of silence, of 
forbearing ? Need we be so eager to seek him ? If we 
are related, we shall meet. It was a tradition of the 
ancient world that no metamorphosis could hide a 
god from a god; and there is a Greek verse which 
runs, — 

"The gods are to each other not unknown." 41 

Friends also follow the laws of divine necessity; they 
gravitate to each other, and cannot otherwise : — 
" When each the other shall avoid, 

Shall each by each be most enjoyed." 42 

Their relation is not made, but allowed. The gods 
must seat themselves without seneschal 43 in our Olym- 
pus, and as they can instal themselves by seniority 
divine. Society is spoiled if pains are taken, if the 
associates are brought a mile to meet. And if it be 
not society, it is a mischievous, low, degrading jangle, 
though made up of the best. All the greatness of each 
is kept back and every foible 44 in painful activity, as 
if the Olympians should meet to exchange snuff-boxes. 
Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, 
or we are hunted by some fear or command behind 
us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; 
our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, 
now possession is required, and the power to swell 
the moment from the resources of the heart. The mo- 
ment is all, in all noble relations. 



80 ESSAYS 

A divine person is the prophecy of the mind ; a friend 
is the hope of the heart. Our beatitude waits for the 
fulfilment of these two in one. The ages are opening 
this moral force. All force is the shadow or symbol of 
that. Poetry is joyful and strong as it draws its inspira- 
tion thence. Men write their names on the world as 
they are filled with this. History has been mean; our 
nations have been mobs; we have never seen a man; 
that divine form we do not yet know, but only the 
dream and prophecy of such : we do not know the 
majestic manners which belong to him, which appease 
and exalt the beholder. We shall one day see that the 
most private is the most public energy, that quality 
atones for quantity, and grandeur of character acts 
in the dark, and succors them who never saw it. What 
greatness has yet appeared is beginnings and encour- 
agements to us in this direction. The history of those 
gods and saints which the world has written and then 
worshipped, are documents of character. The ages 
have exulted in the manners of a youth 45 who owed 
nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Ty- 
burn 46 of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his 
nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his 
death which has transfigured every particular into an 
universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great 
defeat is hitherto our highest fact. But the mind re- 
quires a victory to the senses; a force of character 
which will convert judge, jury, soldier and king; which 
will rule animal and mineral virtues, and blend with 
the courses of sap, of rivers, of winds, of stars, and of 
moral agents. 

If we cannot attain at a bound to these grandeurs, 
at least let us do them homage. In society, high ad- 
vantages are set down to the possessor as disadvan- 



CHARACTER 81 

tages. It requires the more wariness in our private 
estimates. I do not forgive in my friends the failure 
to know a fine character and to entertain it with thank- 
ful hospitality. When at last that which we have al- 
ways longed for is arrived and shines on us with glad 
rays out of that far celestial land, then to be coarse, 
then to be critical and treat such a visitant with the 
jabber and suspicion of the streets, argues a vulgarity 
that seems to shut the doors of heaven. This is con- 
fusion, this the right insanity, when the soul no longer 
knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, 
are due. Is there any religion but this, to know that 
wherever in the wide desert of being the holy senti- 
ment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms 
for me ? if none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, 
of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will 
keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom 
and my folly and jokes. Nature is indulged by the 
presence of this guest. There are many eyes that can 
detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; 
there are many that can discern Genius on his starry 
track, though the mob is incapable; but when that 
love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, 
which has vowed to itself that it will be a wretch and 
also a fool in this world sooner than soil its white hands 
by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses, 
— only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and 
the only compliment they can pay it is to own it. 47 



SELF-RELIANCE 

" Ne te quaesiveris extra." 

Man is his own star; and the soul that can 
Render an honest and a perfect man, 
Commands all light, all influence, all fate; 
Nothing to him falls early or too late. 
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. 

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's Honest Man's Fortune. 



Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
Suckle him with the she-wolf's teat, 
Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
Power and speed be hands and feet. 



SELF-RELIANCE 

I read the other day some verses written by an emi- 
nent painter * which were original and not conven- 
tional. The soul always hears an admonition in such 
lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they 
instil is of more value than any thought they may con- 
tain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what 
is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, 
— that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and 
it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due 
time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is ren- 
dered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. 
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the high- 
est merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is 
that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke 
not what men, but what they thought. A man should 
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which 
flashes across his mind from within, more than the 
lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he 
dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. 
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected 
thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alien- 
ated majesty. 2 Great works of art have no more af- 
fecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide 
by our spontaneous impression with good-humored 
inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices 
is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will 
say with masterly good sense precisely what we have 
thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced 
to take with shame our own opinion from another. 



86 ESSAYS 

There is a time in every man's education when he 
arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that 
imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for bet- 
ter for worse as his portion; that though the wide uni- 
verse is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can 
come to him but through his toil bestowed on that 
plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power 
which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he 
knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know 
until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one char- 
acter, one fact, makes much impression on him and 
another none. This sculpture in the memory is not 
without preestablished harmony. 3 The eye was placed 
where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that 
particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and 
are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us re- 
presents. It may be safely intrusted as proportionate 
and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but 
God will not have his work made manifest by cow- 
ards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his 
heart into his work and done his best; but what he has 
said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is 
a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt 
his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no inven- 
tion, no hope. 

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron 
string. Accept the place the divine providence has 
found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the 
connection of events. Great men have always done 
so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of 
their age, betraying their perception that the abso- 
lutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working 
through their hands, predominating in all their being. 
And we are now men, and must accept in the highest 



SELF-RELIANCE 87 

mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors 
and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards flee- 
ing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and 
benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advanc- 
ing on Chaos and the Dark. 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in 
the face and behavior of children, babes, and even 
brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust 
of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed 
the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these 
have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet 
unconquered, and when we look in their faces we are 
disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody; all con- 
form to it; so that one babe commonly makes four or 
five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So 
God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no 
less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it 
enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, 
if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no 
force, because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark! 
in the next room his voice is sufficiently clear and em- 
phatic. It seems he knows how to speak to his con- 
temporaries. Bashful or bold then, he will know how 
to make us seniors very unnecessary. 4 

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, 
and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught 
to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human na- 
ture. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the play- 
house; independent, irresponsible, looking out from 
his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries 
and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, sum- 
mary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, elo- 
quent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about 
consequences, about interests; he gives an indepen- 



88 ESSAYS 

dent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does 
not court you. But the man is as it were clapped into 
jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted 
or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched 
by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose af- 
fections must now enter into his account. There is no 
Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his 
neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges and, hav- 
ing observed, observe again from the same unaffected, 
unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, — must 
always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all 
passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but 
necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men 
and put them in fear. 

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but 
they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the 
world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against 
the manhood of every one of its members. Society is 
a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, 
for the better securing of his bread to each share- 
holder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. 
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reli- 
ance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, 
but names and customs. 

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. 
He who would gather immortal palms must not be 
hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if 
it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integ- 
rity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and 
you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember 
an answer which when quite young I was prompted 
to make to a valued adviser who was wont to impor- 
tune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. 
On my saying, "What have I to do with the sacred- 



SELF-RELIANCE 89 

ness of traditions, if I live wholly from within ? " my 
friend suggested, — " But these impulses may be from 
below, not from above." I replied, "They do not 
seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, 
I will live then from the Devil. " No law can be sacred 
to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but 
names very readily transferable to that or this; the 
only right is what is after my constitution; the only 
wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself 
in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were 
titular and ephemeral but he. 5 I am ashamed to think 
how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large 
societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well- 
spoken individual affects and sways me more than is 
right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the 
rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the 
coat of philanthropy, shall that pass ? If an angry 
bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and 
comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, 6 why 
should I not say to him, 'Go love thy infant; love thy 
wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have 
that grace; and never varnish your hard, unchari- 
table ambition with this incredible tenderness for black 
folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at 
home.' Rough and graceless would be such greeting, 
but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. 
Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it 
is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as 
the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that 
pules and chines. I shun father and mother and wife 
and brother when my genius calls me. I would write 
on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is 
somewhat bettei. than whim at last, but we cannot 
spend the day in xplanation. Expect me not to show 



90 ESSAYS 

cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then 
again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my 
obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are 
they my poor ? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, 
that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to 
such men as do not belong to me and to whom 
I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom 
by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for 
them I will go to prison if need be; but your mis- 
cellaneous popular charities; the education at college 
of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain 
end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the 
thousand-fold Relief Societies; — though I confess 
with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, 
it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the 
manhood to withhold. 

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the ex- 
ception than the rule. There is the man and his vir- 
tues. Men do what is called a good action, as some 
piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay 
a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. 
Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of 
their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane 
pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not 
wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not 
for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a 
lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it 
should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound 
and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask 
primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this 
appeal from the man to his actions. 7 I hnow that for 
myself it makes no difference whether } . do or forbear 
those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot 
consent to pay for a privilege wher ; I have intrinsic 



SELF-RELIANCE 91 

right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, 
and do not need for my own assurance or the assur- 
ance of my fellows any secondary testimony. 

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what 
the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual 
and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole dis- 
tinction between greatness and meanness. It is the 
harder because you will always find those who think 
they know what is your duty better than you know 
it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opin- 
ion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but 
the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps 
with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. 

The objection to conforming to usages that have be- 
come dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses 
your time and blurs the impression of your character. 
If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead 
Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the 
government or against it, spread your table like base 
housekeepers, — under all these screens I have diffi- 
culty to detect the precise man you are : and of course 
so much force is withdrawn from all your proper 
life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do 
your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man 
must consider what a blind-man's-buff is this game 
of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your 
argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text 
and topic the expediency of one of the institutions 
of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not 
possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word ? 
Do I not know that with all this ostentation of exam- 
ining the grounds of the institution he will do no such 
thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to him- 
self not to look but at one side, the permitted side, 



92 ESSAYS 

not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a re- 
tained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the 
emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound 
their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and at- 
tached themselves to some one of these communities 
of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in 
a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in 
all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. 
Their two is not the real two, their four not the real 
four; so that every word they say chagrins 8 us and we 
know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime 
nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of 
the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one 
cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the 
gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying ex- 
perience in particular, which does not fail to wreak 
itself also in the general history; I mean the "foolish 
face of praise," the forced smile which we put on in 
company where we do not feel at ease, in answer to 
conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, 
not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurp- 
ing wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face, 
with the most disagreeable sensation. 

For nonconformity the world whips you with its 
displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to 
estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on 
him in the public street or in the friend's parlor. If 
this aversion had its origin in contempt and resistance 
like his own he might well go home with a sad counte- 
nance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their 
sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and 
off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is 
the discontent of the multitude more formidable than 
that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough 



SELF-RELIANCE 93 

for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage 
of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and 
prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable 
themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indig- 
nation of the people is added, when the ignorant and 
the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute 
force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl 
and mow, 9 it needs the habit of magnanimity and re- 
ligion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our 
consistency; a reverence for our past act or word be- 
cause the eyes of others have no other data for com- 
puting our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to 
disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your shoul- 
der ? 10 Why drag about this corpse of your memory, 
lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or 
that public place ? Suppose you should contradict your- 
self ; what then ? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never 
to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of 
pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into 
the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. 
In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the 
Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, 
yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe 
God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Jo- 
seph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee. 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, 
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and di- 
vines. With consistency a great soul has simply no- 
thing to do. He may as well concern himself with his 
shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in 
hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow 
thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every 



94 ESSAYS 

thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to 
be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad then to be misunder- 
stood ? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, 
and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, 
and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever 
took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. 11 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the 
sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, 
as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insig- 
nificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter 
how you gauge and try him. A character is like an 
acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; 12 — read it forward, 
backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In 
this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, 
let me record day by day my honest thought without 
prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be 
found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it 
not. My book should smell of pines and resound with 
the hum of insects. 13 The swallow over my window 
should interweave that thread or straw he carries in 
his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. 
Character teaches above our wills. 14 Men imagine 
that they communicate their virtue or vice only by 
overt actions, and do not see, that virtue or vice emit a 
breath every moment. 

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of 
actions, so they be each honest and natural in their 
hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, 
however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost 
sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. 
One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best 
ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line 
from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to 
the average tendency. Your genuine action will ex- 



SELF-RELIANCE 95 

plain itself and will explain your other genuine ac- 
tions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, 
and what you have already done singly will justify you 
now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm 
enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have 
done so much right before as to defend me now. Be 
it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances 
and you always may. The force of character is cumu- 
lative. All the foregone days of virtue work their 
health into this. What makes the majesty of the he- 
roes of the senate and the field, which so fills the ima- 
gination ? The consciousness of a train of great days 
and victories behind. They shed a united light on the 
advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort 
of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chat- 
ham's voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and 
America into Adams's eye. Honor is venerable to us 
because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient vir- 
tue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. 
We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap 
for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self- 
derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, 
even if shown in a young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last of con- 
formity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted 
and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for 
dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let 
us never bow and apologize more. A great man is com- 
ing to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him ; I 
wish that he would wish to please me. I will stand 
here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, 
I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the 
smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the 
times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and 



96 ESS A YS 

office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that 
there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor work- 
ing wherever a man works; that a true man belongs 
to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. 
Where he is there is nature. He measures you and 
all men and all events. Ordinarily, every body in so- 
ciety reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other 
person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing 
else; it takes place of 15 the whole creation. The 
man must be so much that he must make all circum- 
stances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a coun- 
try, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers 
and time fully to accomplish his design ; — and pos- 
terity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A 
man Csesar is born, and for ages after we have a Ro- 
man Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so 
grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded 
with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is 
the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, 
of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; 
Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, 
of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of 
Rome ; " and all history resolves itself very easily into 
the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things 
under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up 
and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or 
an interloper in the world which exists for him. But 
the man in the street, finding no worth in himself 
which corresponds to the force which built a tower or 
sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on 
these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have 
an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, 
and seem to say like that, 'Who are you, Sir?' Yet 



SELF-RELIANCE 97 

they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his 
faculties that they will come out and take possession. 
The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command 
me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popu- 
lar fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in 
the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and 
dressed and laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, 
treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, 
and assured that he had been insane, owes its popu- 
larity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of 
man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and 
then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself 
a true prince. 16 

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In his- 
tory our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and 
lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary 
than private John and Edward in a small house and 
common day's work; but the things of life are the same 
to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all 
this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg 17 and Gus- 
tavus? Suppose they were virtuous; 18 did they wear 
out virtue ? As great a stake depends on your private 
act to-day as followed their public and renowned steps. 
When private men shall act with original views, the 
lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to 
those of gentlemen. 

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have 
so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught 
by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is 
due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which 
men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or 
the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of 
his own, make his own scale of men and things and re- 
verse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with 



98 ESSAYS 

honor, and represent the law in his person, was the 
hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their 
consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the 
right of every man. 

The magnetism which all original action exerts is 
explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. 
Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on 
which a universal reliance may be grounded ? What 
is the nature and power of that science-bafHing star, 
without parallax, without calculable elements, which 
shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure ac- 
tions, if the least mark of independence appear ? The 
inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of 
genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity 
or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intu- 
ition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that 
deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot 
go, all things find their common origin. For the sense 
of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, 
in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from 
light, from time, from man, but one with them and 
proceeds obviously from the same source whence their 
life and being also proceed. 19 We first share the life by 
which things exist and afterwards see them as appear- 
ances in nature and forget that we have shared their 
cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. 
Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth 
man wisdom and which cannot be denied without 
impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense in- 
telligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and 
organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when 
we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow 
a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, 
if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philo- 



SELF-RELIANCE 99 

sophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we 
can affirm. Every man discriminates between the vol- 
untary acts of his mind and his involuntary percep- 
tions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions 
a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of 
them, but he knows that these things are so, like day 
and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and 
acquisitions are but roving; — the idlest -reverie, the 
faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and 
respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the 
statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much 
more readily; for they do not distinguish between per- 
ception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see 
this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, 
but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after 
me, and in course of time all mankind, — although it 
may chance that no one has seen it before me. For 
my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun. 

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so 
pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It 
must be that when God speaketh he should commu- 
nicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the 
world with his voice ; should scatter forth light, nature, 
time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; 
and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a 
mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things 
pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it 
lives now, and absorbs past and future into the pre- 
sent hour. All things are made sacred by relation to 
it, — one as much as another. All things are dissolved 
to their centre by their cause, and in the universal 
miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. If 
therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and 
carries you backward to the phraseology of some old 



100 ESSAYS 

mouldered nation in another country, in another world, 
believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which 
is its fulness and completion ? Is the parent better than 
the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? 
Whence then this worship of the past ? The centuries 
are conspirators against the sanity and authority of 
the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors 
which the eye makes, but the soul is light : where it is, 
is day; where it was, is night; and history is an im- 
pertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than 
a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and be- 
coming. 

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; 
he dares not say 'I think/ 'I am,' but quotes some 
saint or sage. 20 He is ashamed before the blade of grass 
or the blowing rose. These roses under my window 
make no reference to former roses or to better ones; 
they are for what they are; they exist with God to- 
day. There is no time to them. There is simply the 
rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. 
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the 
full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root 
there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies 
nature in all moments alike. But man postpones or 
remembers; he does not live in the present, but with 
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches 
that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the 
future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too 
lives with nature in the present, above time. 

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong 
intellects dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak 
the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jere- 
miah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price 
on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children 



SELF-RELIANCE 101 

who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and 
tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents 
and character they chance to see, — painfully recol- 
lecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when 
they come into the point of view which those had who 
uttered these sayings, they understand them and are 
willing to let the words go; for at any time they can 
use words as good when occasion comes. If we live 
truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong 
man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. 
When we have new perception, we shall gladly disbur- 
den the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rub- 
bish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be 
as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of 
the corn. 

And now at last the highest truth on this subject 
remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that 
we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That 
thought by what I can now nearest approach to say 
it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life 
in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way ; 
you shall not discern the footprints of any other; 
you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear 
any name; — the way, the thought, the good, shall be 
wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and 
experience. You take the way from man, not to man. 
All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. 
Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is some- 
what low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is 
nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. 
The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eter- 
nal causation, perceives the self -existence of Truth 
and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things 
go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, 



102 ESSAYS 

the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, 
are of no account. This which I think and feel under- 
lay every former state of life and circumstances, as it 
does underlie my present, and what is called life and 
what is called death. 

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases 
in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of 
transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting 
of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the 
world hates ; that the soul becomes; for that forever 
degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all repu- 
tation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, 
shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do 
we prate of self-reliance ? Inasmuch as the soul is pre- 
sent there will be power not confident but agent. 21 To 
talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. 
Speak rather of that which relies because it works and 
is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though 
he should not raise his finger. Round him I must re- 
volve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhe- 
toric when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet 
see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company 
of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the 
law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, na- 
tions, kings, rich men, poets, who are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach 
on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the 
ever-blessed One. Self -existence is the attribute of 
the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of 
good by the degree in which it enters into all lower 
forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they 
contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, 
war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and 
engage my respect as examples of its presence and im- 



SELF-RELIANCE 103 

pure action. I see the same law working in nature 
for conservation and growth. Power is, in nature, the 
essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to 
remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The 
genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, 
the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, 
the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are 
demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self- 
relying soul. 

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at 
home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the 
intruding rabble of men and books and institutions 
by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the 
invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is 
here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our 
docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of 
nature and fortune beside our native riches. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe 
of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, 
to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, 
but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of 
other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church 
before the service begins, better than any preaching. 
How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, 
begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary ! 22 So let 
us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our 
friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit 
around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood ? 
All men have my blood and I all men's. Not for that 
will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent 
of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not 
be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. 
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to 
importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, climate, 



104 ESS A YS 

child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once 
at thy closet door and say, — 'Come out unto us.' 
But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The 
power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak 
curiosity. No man can come near me but through my 
act. "What we love that we have, but by desire we 
bereave ourselves of the love." 

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedi- 
ence and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; 
let us enter into the state of war and wake Thor and 
Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. 
This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking 
the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affec- 
tion. Live no longer to the expectation of these de- 
ceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. 
Say to them, ' O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, 

friend, I have lived with you after appearances 
hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known 
unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than 
the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximi- 
ties. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support 
my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — 
but these relations I must fill after a new and unpre- 
cedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must 
be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, 
or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be 
the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve 
that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. 

1 will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do 
strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly re- 
joices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I 
will love you ; if you are not, I will not hurt you and 
myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but 
not in the same truth with me, cleave to your com- 



SELF-RELIANCE 105 

panions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly but 
humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, 
and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to 
live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You 
will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well 
as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us out 
safe at last. — But so may you give these friends pain. 
Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to 
save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their 
moments of reason, when they look out into the region 
of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the 
same thing. 

The populace think that your rejection of popular 
standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere 
antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the 
name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of 
consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in 
one or the other of which we must be shriven. You 
may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in 
the direct or in the re-flex way. Consider whether you 
have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, 
neighbor, town, cat and dog — whether any of these 
can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex 
standard and absolve me to myself. I have my own 
stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of 
duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I 
can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with 
the popular code. If any one imagines that this law 
is lax, let him keep its commandment one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in him who 
has cast off the common motives of humanity and has 
ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be 
his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may 
in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, 



106 ESS A YS 

that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron 
necessity is to others! 

If any man consider the present aspects of what is 
called by distinction society, he will see the need of 
these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be 
drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding 
whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, 
afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age 
yields no great and perfect persons. 23 We want men 
and women who shall renovate life and our social state, 
but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot 
satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all 
proportion to their practical force and do lean and 
beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is 
mendicant, 24 our arts, our occupations, our marriages, 
our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen 
for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged 
battle of fate, where strength is born. 

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises 
they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men 
say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of 
our colleges and is not installed in an office within one 
year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or 
New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that 
he is right in being disheartened and in complaining 
the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire 
or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who 
teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, 
edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, 
and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat 
falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. 
He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in 
not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone 
his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but 



SELF-RELIANCE 107 

a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of 
man and tell men they are not leaning willows, but 
can and must detach themselves ; that with the exercise 
of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is 
the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the na- 
tions; that he should be ashamed of our compassion, 
and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the 
laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the win- 
dow, we pity him no more but thank and revere him; 
— and that teacher shall restore the life of man to 
splendor and make his name dear to all history. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work 
a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in 
their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; 
their modes of living; their association; in their pro- 
perty; in their speculative views. 

1 . In what prayers do men allow themselves ! 25 That 
which they call a holy office is not so much as brave 
and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some 
foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, 
and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and super- 
natural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that 
craves a particular commodity, anything less than all 
good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the 
facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the 
soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the 
spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer 
as a means to effect a private end is meanness and 
theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature 
and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with 
God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all 
action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field 
to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the 
stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout 



108 ESS A YS 

nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher's 
" Bonduca, " 26 when admonished to inquire the mind 
of the god Audate, replies, — 

"His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors; 
Our valors are our best gods." 

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Dis- 
content is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of 
will. Regret calamities if you can thereby help the 
sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the 
evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as 
base. We come to them who weep foolishly and sit 
down and cry for company, instead of imparting to 
them truth and health in rough electric shocks, put- 
ting them once more in communication with their 
own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. 
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-help- 
ing man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all 
tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with 
desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him 
because he did not need it. We solicitously and apolo- 
getically caress and celebrate him because he held on 
his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods 
love him because men hated him. "To the persever- 
ing mortal, " said Zoroaster, " the blessed Immortals 
are swift." 

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are 
their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with 
those foolish Israelites, ' Let not God speak to us, lest 
we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we 
will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God 
in my brother, 27 because he has shut his own temple 
doors and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his 
brother's brother's God. Every new mind is a new ' 



SELF-RELIANCE 109 

classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity 
and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, 
a Fourier, 28 it imposes its classification on other men, 
and lo ! a new system ! In proportion to the depth of the 
thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches 
and brings within reach of the pupil, is his compla- 
cency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and 
churches, which are also classifications of some power- 
ful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty and 
man's relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, 
Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same 
delight in subordinating every thing to the new termi- 
nology as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing 
a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen 
for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power 
has grown by the study of his master's mind. But 
in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolized, 
passes for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible 
means, so that the walls of the system blend to their 
eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the uni- 
verse; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on 
the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how 
you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see; 
'It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.' 
They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, in- 
domitable, 29 will break into any cabin, even into theirs. 
Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. 30 If they 
are honest and do well, presently their neat new pin- 
fold will be too strait and low,will crack, will lean, will 
rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and 
joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over 
the universe as on the first morning. 

2. It is. for want of self-culture that the superstition 
of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, 



110 ESS A YS 

retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They 
who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the 
imagination, did so by sticking fast where they were, 
like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that 
duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise 
man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, 
on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign 
lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible 
by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the 
missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and 
men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a 
valet. 

I have no churlish objection to the circumnaviga- 
tion of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and 
benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or 
does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat 
greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, 
or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels 
away from himself, and grows old even in youth among 
old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind 
have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries 
ruins to ruins. 

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys 
discover to us the indifference of places. At home I 
dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated 
with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, 
embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last 
wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern 
fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. 
I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be 
intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not 
intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. 31 

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper 
unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. 



SELF-R ELI A NCE 111 

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of educa- 
tion fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our 
bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and 
what is imitation but the travelling of the mind ? Our 
houses are built with foreign taste ; our shelves are gar- 
nished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, 
our faculties lean, and follow the Past and the Dis- 
tant. The soul created the arts wherever they have 
flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought 
his model. It was an application of his own thought to 
the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. 
And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model ? 
Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint 
expression 32 are as near to us as to any, and if the Ameri- 
can artist will study with hope and love the precise thing 
to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, 
the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit 
and form of the government, he will create a house in 
which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste 
and sentiment will be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you 
can present every moment with the cumulative force of 
a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of 
another you have only an extemporaneous half posses- 
sion. That which each can do best, none but his Ma- 
ker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor 
can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the mas- 
ter who could have taught Shakespeare ? Where is the 
master who could have instructed Franklin, or Wash- 
ington, or Bacon, or Newton ? Every great man is a 
unique. 33 The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part 
he could not borrow. Shakespeare will never be made 
by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned 
you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. 



112 ESSAYS 

There is at this moment for you an utterance brave 
and grand as that of the colossal 34 chisel of Phidias, or 
trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, 
but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, 
all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, 
deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these 
patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same 
pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs 
of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions 
of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the 
Fore world again. 

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look 
abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume 
themselves on the improvement of society, and no man 
improves. 

Society never advances. 35 It recedes as fast on one 
side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual 
changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christian- 
ized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not 
amelioration. For every thing that is given something 
is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old in- 
stincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, read- 
ing, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil 
and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked 
New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a 
mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep 
under! But compare the health of the two men and 
you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal 
strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage 
with a broad-axe and in a day or two the flesh shall 
unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, 
and the same blow shall send the white to his grave. 

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the 
use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks 



SELF-RELIANCE 113 

so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva 
watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the 
sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so 
being sure of the information when he wants it, the 
man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The 
solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as 
little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is 
without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his 
memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance- 
office increases the number of accidents; and it may 
be a question whether machinery does not encumber; 
whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, 
by a Christianity, entrenched in establishments and 
forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was 
a Stoic ; but in Christendom where is the Christian ? 

There is no more deviation in the moral standard 
than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater 
men are now than ever were. A singular equality may 
be observed between the great men of the first and of 
the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and 
philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate 
greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and 
twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progres- 
sive. Phocion, 36 Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, 37 are 
great men, but they leave no class. He who is really 
of their class will not be called by their name, but will 
be his own man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. 
The arts and inventions of each period are only its 
costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of the 
improved machinery may compensate its good. Hud- 
son and Behring accomplished so much in their fish- 
ing-boats as to astonish Parry 38 and Franklin, 39 whose 
equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. 
Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid 



114 ESSAYS 

series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Co- 
lumbus found the New World in an undecked boat. 
It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing 
of means and machinery which were introduced with 
loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The 
great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned 
the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs 
of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by 
the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked 
valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor 
held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las 
Casas, " without abolishing our arms, magazines, com- 
missaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Ro- 
man custom, the soldier should receive his supply of 
corn, grind it in his hand-mill and bake his bread him- 
self." 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but 
the water of which it is composed does not. The same 
particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its 
unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up 
a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience 
dies with them. 

And so the reliance on Property, including the re- 
liance on governments which protect it, is the want of 
self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves 
and at things so long that they have come to esteem 
the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards 
of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, be- 
cause they feel them to be assaults on property. They 
measure their esteem of each other by what each has, 
and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes 
ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his 
nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that 
it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, 



SELF-RELIANCE 115 

or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not 
belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there 
because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But 
that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire; 
and what the man acquires, is living property, which 
does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolu- 
tions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetu- 
ally renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy 
lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking 
after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." 40 
Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our 
slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet 
in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse 
and with each new uproar of announcement, The de- 
legation from Essex ! The Democrats from New Hamp- 
shire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels 
himself stronger than before by a new thousand of 
eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon 
conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not 
so, O friends ! will the God deign to enter and inhabit 
you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only 
as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone 
that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker 
by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better 
than a town ? Ask nothing of men, and, in the endless 
mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear 
the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows 
that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has 
looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and, so per- 
ceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, 
instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, 
commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man 
who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who 
stands on his head. 



116 ESSAYS 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble 
with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. 
But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and 
deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In 
the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the 
wheel of Chance, and shall sit hereafter out of fear 
from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, 
the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent 
friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, 
and you think good days are preparing for you. Do 
not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but your- 
self. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of 
principles. 41 



HEROISM 



Paradise is under the shadow of swords. — Mahomet. 

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves, 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves, 
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons; 
Thunderclouds are Jove's festoons, 
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread 
Lightning-knotted round his head: 
The hero is not fed on sweets, 
Daily his own heart he eats; 
Chambers of the great are jails, 
And head-winds right for royal sails. 



HEROISM 

In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the 
plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant 
recognition of gentility, as if a noble behavior were as 
easily marked in the society of their age as color is in 
our American population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro 
or Valerio * enters, though he be a stranger, the duke 
or governor exclaims, 'This is a gentleman,' — and 
proffers civilities without end; but all the rest are slag 
and refuse. In harmony with this delight in personal 
advantages there is in their plays a certain heroic cast 
of character and dialogue, — as in Bonduca, Sopho- 
cles, 2 the Mad Lover, the Double Marriage, — wherein 
the speaker is so earnest and cordial and on such deep 
grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the slight- 
est additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into 
poetry. Among many texts take the following. The 
Roman Martius has conquered Athens, — all but the 
invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens, 
and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter in- 
flames Martius, and he seeks to save her husband ; but 
Sophocles will not ask his life, although assured that 
a word will save him, and the execution of both pro- 
ceeds : — 

Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell. 

Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen, 
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown, 
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste. 

Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight; 
Let not soft nature so transformed be, 



120 ESS A YS 

And lose her gentler sexed humanity, 

To make me see my lord bleed. So, 't is well; 

Never one object underneath the sun 

Will I behold before my Sophocles: 

Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die. 

Mar. Dost know what 't is to die ? 

Soph. Thou dost not, Martius, 

And, therefore, not what 't is to live; to die 
Is to begin to live. It is to end 
An old, stale, weary work and to commence 
A newer and a better. 'T is to leave 
Deceitful knaves for the society 
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part 
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs, 
And prove thy fortitude what then 't will do. 

Vol. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus? 

Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent 
To them I ever loved best? Now I'll kneel, 
But with my back toward thee : 't is the last duty 
This trunk can do the gods. 

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius, 

Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth. 
This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord, 
And live with all the freedom you were wont. 
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me 
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart, 
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn, 
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety. 

Val. What ails my brother? 

Soph. Martius, O Martius, 

Thou now hast found a way to conquer me. 

Dor. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak 
Fit words to follow such a deed as this? 

Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius, 
With his disdain of fortune and of death, 
Captived himself, has captivated me, 
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here, 
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul. 
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think; 
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved, 
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free, 
And Martius walks now in captivity." 



HEROISM 121 

I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, 
novel or oration that our press vents in the last few 
years, which goes to the same tune. We have a great 
many flutes and flageolets, but not often the sound 
of any fife. Yet Wordsworth's " Laodamia," and the 
ode of " Dion," and some sonnets, have a certain noble 
music; and Scott will sometimes draw a stroke like the 
portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. 3 
Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is 
manly and daring in character, has suffered no heroic 
trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical and 
historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given 
us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies 4 there 
is an account of the battle of Lutzen 5 which deserves 
to be read. And Simon Ockley's 6 History of the Sara- 
cens recounts the prodigies of individual valor, with 
admiration all the more evident on the part of the nar- 
rator that he seems to think that his place in Christian 
Oxford requires of him some proper protestations of 
abhorrence. But if we explore the literature of Heroism 
we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its doctor 
and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, 
the Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think 
we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the 
ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation 
to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and 
political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of 
the schools but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, 
and has given that book its immense fame. 7 

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more 
than books of political science or of private economy. 
Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook 
and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and 
dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature 



122 ESSAYS 

by our predecessors and our contemporaries are pun- 
ished in us also. The disease and deformity around 
us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual and 
moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed 
such compound misery. A lock-jaw that bends a man's 
head back to his heels; hydrophobia that makes him 
bark at his wife and babes; insanity that makes him 
eat grass ; war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate a cer- 
tain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by 
human crime, must have its outlet by human suffer- 
ing. Unhappily no man exists who has not in his own 
person become to some amount a stockholder in the 
sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expi- 
ation. 

Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of 
the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into 
the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his 
own well-being require that he should not go dancing 
in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and 
neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take 
both reputation and life in his hand, and with perfect 
urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute 
truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior. 

Towards all this external evil the man within the 
breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his abil- 
ity to cope single-handed with the infinite army of ene- 
mies. To this military attitude of the soul we give the 
name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for 
safety and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. 
It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of pru- 
dence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to re- 
pair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind 8 of 
such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, 
but pleasantly and as it were merrily he .advances to 



HEROISM 123 

his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy 
mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is somewhat 
not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not 
holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are of 
one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of 
individual nature. Nevertheless we must profoundly 
revere it. There is somewhat in great actions which 
does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism feels 
and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and 
although a different breeding, different religion and 
greater intellectual activity would have modified or 
even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero 
that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open 
to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the 
avowal of the unschooled man that he finds a quality 
in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of 
danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will 
is higher and more excellent than all actual and all 
possible antagonists. 

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of man- 
kind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of 
the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a se- 
cret impulse of an individual's character. Now to no 
other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, 
for every man must be supposed to see a little farther 
on his own proper path than any one else. Therefore 
just and wise men take umbrage at his act, until after 
some little time be past; then they see it to be in unison 
with their acts. All prudent men 9 see that the action 
is clean contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every he- 
roic act measures itself by its contempt of some ex- 
ternal good. But it finds its own success at last, and 
then the prudent also extol. 

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of 



124 ESSAYS 

the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last de- 
fiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear 
all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the 
truth and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, 
scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being 
scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness 
and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the 
littleness of common life. That false prudence which 
dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment 
of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed 
of its body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums 
and cats'-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, 
cards and custard, which rack the wit of all society? 
What joys has kind nature provided for us dear crea- 
tures! There seems to be no interval between great- 
ness and meanness. 10 When the spirit is not master of 
the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes 
the great hoax so innocently, works in it so headlong 
and believing, is born red, and dies gray, arranging his 
toilet, attending on his own health, laying traps for 
sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse 
or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little 
praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at 
such earnest nonsense. 11 " Indeed, these humble con- 
siderations make me out of love with greatness. What 
a disgrace it is to me to take note how many pairs of 
silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that 
were the peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory 
of thy shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for 



use! 



l" 12 



Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, con- 
sider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at their 
fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and the un- 
usual display ; the soul of a better quality thrusts back 



• HEROISM 125 

the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and 
says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire 
he will provide. Ibn Haukal, 13 the Arabian geographer, 
describes a heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, 
in Bukharia. "When I was in Sogd I saw a great 
building, like a palace, the gates of which were open and 
fixed back to the wall with large nails. I asked the rea- 
son, and was told that the house had not been shut, 
night or day, for a hundred years. Strangers may pre- 
sent themselves at any hour and in whatever number; 
the master has amply provided for the reception of the 
men and their animals, and is never happier than when 
they tarry for some time. Nothing of the kind have I 
seen in any other country. " The magnanimous know 
very well that they who give time, or money, or shel- 
ter, to the stranger, — so it be done for love and not 
for ostentation, — do, as it were, put God under obli- 
gation to them, 14 so perfect are the compensations of 
the universe. In some way the time they seem to lose 
is redeemed and the pains they seem to take remuner- 
ate themselves. These men fan the flame of human 
love and raise the standard of civil virtue among man- 
kind. But hospitality must be for service and not for 
show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates 
itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table 
and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but 
its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks 
and fair water than belong to city feasts. 

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same 
wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he 
loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems 
not worth his while to be solemn and denounce with 
bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of to- 
bacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man 



125 ESS A YS 

scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but with- 
out railing or precision his living is natural and poetic. 
John Eliot, 15 the Indian Apostle, drank water, and 
said of wine, — " It is a noble, generous liquor and we 
should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, 
water was made before it. " Better still is the temper- 
ance of King David, 16 who poured out on the ground 
unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had 
brought him to drink at the peril of their lives. 

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword 
after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripi- 
des, — {t O Virtue ! I have followed thee through life, 
and I find thee at last but a shade. " I doubt not the 
hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does 
not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to 
dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of great- 
ness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty 
is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very 
well abide its loss. 

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic 
class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. 17 
It is a height to which common duty can very well at- 
tain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these 
rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a 
rate that they will not soothe their enemies by peti- 
tions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habit- 
ual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses 
to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justifi- 
cation, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his 
hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. 18 Soc- 
rates's condemnation of himself 19 to be maintained 
in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and 
Sir Thomas More's playfulness 20 at the scaffold, are of 
the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher's "Sea 



HEROISM 127 

Voyage," Juletta tells the stout captain and his com- 
pany, — 

Jul. Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye. 
Master. Very likely, 

'T is in our powers, then, to be hanged and scorn ye. 

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom 
and glow of a perfect health. The great will not con- 
descend to take any thing seriously; all must be as gay 
as the song of a canary, though it were the building 
of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches 
and nations which have cumbered the earth long thou- 
sands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and 
customs of this world behind them, and play their own 
game in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws 21 of the 
world ; and such would appear, could we see the human 
race assembled in vision, like little children frolick- 
ing together, though to the eyes of mankind at large 
they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and in- 
fluences. 

The interest these fine stories have for us, the power 
of a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden 
book under his bench at school, our delight in the hero, 
is the main fact to our purpose. All these great and 
transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in be- 
holding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that 
we are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let 
us find room for this great guest in our small houses. 
The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of 
our superstitious associations with places and times, 
with number and size. Why should these words, Athe- 
nian, Roman, Asia and England, so tingle in the ear ? 
Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods 
sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massa- 
chusetts, Connecticut River and Boston Bay you think 



128 ESSAYS 

paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and 
classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will 
tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. 
See to it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, 
hope and fate, friends, angels and the Supreme Being 
shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sit- 
test. Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, 22 does not 
seem to us to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian 
sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The Jerseys 
were handsome ground 23 enough for Washington to 
tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton. A 
great man makes his climate genial in the imagination 
of men, and its air the beloved element of all delicate 
spirits. That country is the fairest which is inhabited 
by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the ima- 
gination in reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, 
Columbus, Bayard, 24 Sidney, 25 Hampden, 26 teach us 
how needlessly mean our life is ; that we, by the depth 
of our living, should deck it with more than regal or 
national splendor, and act on principles that should in- 
terest man and nature in the length of our days. 27 

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young 
men who never ripened, or whose performance in act- 
ual life was not extraordinary. When we see their air 
and mien, when we hear them speak of society, of books, 
of religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to 
throw contempt on our entire polity and social state; 
theirs is the tone of a youthful giant who is sent to work 
revolutions. But they enter an active profession and 
the forming Colossus shrinks to the common size of 
man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, 
which always make the Actual ridiculous; but the 
tough world had its revenge the moment they put their 
horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found 



HEROISM 129 

no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. 
What then ? The lesson they gave in their first aspira- 
tions is yet true; and a better valor and a purer truth 
shall one day organize their belief. Or why should a 
woman liken herself to any historical woman, and 
think, because Sappho, 28 or Sevigne, 29 or De Stael, 30 or 
the cloistered souls wjio have had genius and cultiva- 
tion do not satisfy the imagination and the serene The- 
mis, 31 none can, — certainly not she? Why not? She 
has a new and unattempted problem to solve, per- 
chance that of the happiest nature that ever bloomed. 
Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on her 
way, accept the hint of each new experience, search in 
turn all the objects that solicit her eye, that she may 
learn the power and the charm of her new-born being, 
which is the kindling of a new dawn in the recesses 
of space. The fair girl who repels interference by a 
decided and proud choice of influences, so careless of 
pleasing, so wilful and lofty, inspires every beholder 
with somewhat of her own nobleness. The silent heart 
encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear! 32 
Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not 
in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered and 
refined by the vision. 

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All 
men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of gener- 
osity. But when you have chosen your part, abide by 
it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the 
world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the com- 
mon the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect 
the sympathy of people in those actions whose excel- 
lence is that they outrun sympathy and appeal to a 
tardy justice. If you would serve your brother, because 
it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your 



130 ESSAYS 

words when you find that prudent people do not com- 
mend you. Adhere to your own act, and congratulate 
yourself if you have done something strange and ex- 
travagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. 
It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young 
person, — "Always do what you are afraid to do." 33 
A simple manly character need never make an apology, 
but should regard its past action with the calmness of 
Phocion, 34 when he admitted that the event of the bat- 
tle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from 
the battle. 

There is no weakness or exposure 35 for which we 
cannot find consolation in the thought — this is a part 
of my constitution, part of my relation and office to my 
fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with me that 
I should never appear to disadvantage, never make a 
ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of our dignity 
as well as of our money. Greatness once and for ever 
has done with opinion. We tell our charities, not be- 
cause we wish to be praised for them, not because we 
think they have great merit, but for our justification. 
It is a capital blunder; as you discover when another 
man recites his charities. 

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live 
with some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of 
generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common 
good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease 
and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with 
the great multitude of suffering men. And not only 
need we breathe and exercise the soul by assuming the 
penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, of unpopu- 
larity, — but it behooves the wise man to look with a 
bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes 
invade men, and to familiarize himself with disgusting 



HEROISM 131 

forms of disease, with sounds of execration, and the 
vision of violent death. 

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but 
the day never shines in which this element may not 
work. The circumstances of man, we say, are his- 
torically somewhat better in this country and at this 
hour than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists 
for culture. It will not now run against an axe at the 
first step out of the beaten track of opinion. But 
whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his edge. 
Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, 
and the trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but 
the other day that the brave Lovejoy 36 gave his breast 
to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech 
and opinion, and died when it was better not to live. 

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can 
walk, but after the counsel of his own bosom. Let him 
quit too much association, let him go home much, and 
stablish himself in those courses he approves. 37 The 
unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments 
in obscure duties is hardening the character to that 
temper which will work with honor, if need be in the 
tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever outrages have 
happened to men may befall a man again; and very 
easily in a republic, if there appear any signs of a de- 
cay of religion. Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers 
and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring home to his 
mind and with what sweetness of temper he can, and 
inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, brav- 
ing such penalties, whenever it may please the next 
newspaper and a sufficient number of his neighbors 
to pronounce his opinions incendiary. 

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the 
most susceptible heart to see how quick a bound Na- 



132 ESSAYS 

ture has set to the utmost infliction of malice. We 
rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can 
follow us : — 

"Let them rave: 
Thou art quiet in thy grave." 38 

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the 
hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, wfio does 
not envy those who have seen safely to an end their 
manful endeavor ? Who that sees the meanness of our 
politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is 
long already wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe; 
that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of human- 
ity not yet subjugated in him ? Who does not some- 
times envy the good and brave who are no more to 
suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await 
with curious complacency the speedy term of his own 
conversation with finite nature ? And yet the love that 
will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already 
made death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but 
a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable 
being. 



NOTES 



COMPENSATION 

Doctor Edward Emerson notes that it is not certain that this 
essay was originally given in lecture form, as were so many 
others. The Centenary Edition also calls attention to the early 
date at which this theme is treated in Emerson's Journal and 
in the Poems (1834). " During the days of his ministry, he wrote 
thus in his Journal: — 

*Chardon St., June 29, 1831. 

1 Is not the law of Compensation perfect? It holds, as far as 
we can see, different gifts to different individuals, but with a 
mortgage of responsibility on every one. "The gods sell all 
things.' ' — Well, old man, hast got no farther? Why, this was 
taught thee months and years ago. It was writ on the autumn 
leaves at Roxbury in keep-school days — it sounded in the 
blind man's ear at Cambridge. And all the joy and all the sor- 
row since have added nothing to thy wooden book. I can't 
help it. Heraclitus, grown old, complains that all resolved it- 
self into identity. . . . And I have nothing charactered in my 
brain that outlives this word Compensation.' " 

Note 1. Mr. Emerson loved to place a motto at the head of 
his chapter. Dr. Holmes suggested that the hereditary use of 
a text before a discourse survived thus in him. C. E. l 

Note 2. The phrase is an example of the startling way in 
which truth that nobody ought to question can be put by an 
Emerson. For an equally unconventional treatment of the 
same idea, the student should compare Robert Browning's 
Instans Tyr annus: — 

11 Did I say ' without friend ' ? 
Say rather, from marge to blue marge 
The whole sky grew his targe 
With the sun's self for visible boss, 
While an Arm ran across 

Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast 
Where the wretch was safe prest! 
Do you see? Just my vengeance complete, 
The man sprang to his feet, 

Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed! 
— So, / was afraid ! " 

1 Centenary Edition of Emerson's Works. Houghton, Mifflin and Co.; 
1904. 



134 NOTES 

Note 3. This sentence is illustrative not only of Emerson's 
philosophy but of his characteristic rhetoric. The reader is 
likely to overemphasize the first clause at the expense of the 
second, to forget that if evil seemed ultimately unreal to Em- 
erson, so did time appear to him a human limitation. Eternal 
justice is now or never. The terms are not badness, success, 
and justice only, but being, appearing, and time as implied by 
them. The underlying thought is not only that of the Platonic 
dialogues, but of the New Testament, John XVII, 3: "And this 
is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and 
Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." To one who knows virtue, 
the "immense concession' ' is indeed a fallacy. 

Note 4. This is a favorite thought with Emerson. Compare 
the famous sentence from Pensees de Pascal, Art. XVI, hi: " Le 
cceur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas." Pascal was a 
favorite author with Emerson, who as a young man carried a 
copy of the Pensees in his pocket. 

Note 5. This is a reference to Spiritual Laws. 

Note 6. The thought of this paragraph is far from simple. 
It takes into account the things which in nature are undoubt- 
edly dual and also the tendency of the mind to associate things 
in pairs until finally the duality becomes merely verbal. The 
same method is used by the Platonic Socrates in conducting 
his dialectic. His victim does not clearly see that some things 
may have more than one opposite. Besides upper and under, 
for example, there is sidelong. The next paragraph is clearly 
an exaggeration of instances into law. 

Note 7. The theory that genius is abnormal has been elabo- 
rately worked out by the Italian Lombroso in The Man of 
Genius. Dryden. in Absalom and Achitophel, Pt. 1, 1. 163, has, — ■ 

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide." 

Note 8. See John I, 7. . 

Note 9. An instance of Emerson's precise use of words: 
''Continuous means unbroken, and is passive; incessant means 
unceasing, and is active." Cent. Diet. 

Note 10. The close of this passage illustrates the way in 
which Emerson used Bible phrases to round out his thought or 
to give familiar point to his distinctions. 

Note 11. This precise combination of words thus far eludes 
search. The sentiment is found in Cicero, Lucretius, Burke, 
Blackstone, and others, but as a quotation it refuses to give 
up its secret. 

Note 12. This passage is not to be interpreted literally of 
course. It reflects Emerson's wide reading and independent 
use of what he had read in science and philosophy. The influence 
of the monad theory of Leibnitz is evident as well as that of the 
evolutionary thought at that time in the air. Darwin's Origin 
of Speeies did not appear until 1850. 



NOTES 135 

Note 13. From a lost play of Sophocles. 

Note 14. The meaning of to truck is to barter or exchange; 
its origin is unknown. It is used in Hakluyt's Voyages. Higgle 
is a form of huckster and means to bend over merchandise for 
the purpose of selling it. The word is used by Crabbe and by 
Sterne, and Burke has " truck and huckster." Both words occur 
in the colloquial speech of New England. 

Note 15. Horace, Epistles, I, 10, "Naturam expellas furca, 
tamen usque recurret." 

Note 16. This word is seldom used with a negative depen- 
dent clause. 

"Brags of his substance, not of ornament." 

Romeo and Juliet, II, vi. 

But the brag is on his lips. 

" Beauty is Nature's brag." 

Milton, Comus, I, 745, 

Note 17. St. Augustine's Confessions, Bk. I. 

Note 18. From the Prometheus of iEschylus. 

Note 19. Punitive ; pertaining to or serving as punishment. 

Note 20. Inhabitants of an island, Thasus, in the iEgean 
Sea off the coast of Thrace. It is mentioned by Virgil, Livy, 
Pliny, Statius, and others. This story of Theagenes is found in 
Pausanias, Bk. VI, ii, 11. The rest of the story is that the rela- 
tives of the victim brought suit against the statue. This cus- 
tom of keeping out natural justice by law is treated by E. B. 
Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, pp. 286-7. The old English 
law declared forfeit such inanimate objects as had caused the 
death of any one, and ordered them to be sold for the poor. 

Note 21. The title of a comedy by Ben Jonson, played in 
1616, printed in 1631. The name of the "less devil" is Pug. 

Note 22. " A clew or cop of thread, twine, or yarn." Cent. Diet. 
In the effort to make his meaning clear, Emerson was casting 
about among the stores of figure with which his experience, 
his reading, and his sympathy familiarized him. The thread- 
ball has taken its place in literature now as one of the quaint 
devices employed by Henrik Ibsen to present the close of Peer 
Gynt's career: — 

Peer 

What is this, like children's weeping? 
Weeping, but half-way to song. — 
Thread-balls at my feet are rolling! — 

{Kicking at them) 

The Thread-Balls {on the ground) 

We are thoughts; 

thou shouldst have thought us; — 

feet to run on 

thou shouldst have given us ! 



136 NOTES 

Peer {going roundabout) 

I have given life to one; — 

't was a bungled, crook-legged thing! 

The Thread-Balls 

We should have soared up 
like clangorous voices, — 
and here we must trundle 
as grey-yarn thread-balls. 

In a letter written about 1845 Emerson says: "It is strange 
how people act on me. I am not a pith-ball nor raw silk, yet 
to human electricity is no piece of humanity so sensible." 

Note 23. The political philosophy of Burke is very congenial 
to that of Emerson. The essays are full of reminiscence of 
Burke's wise sayings and magnanimous politics. Yet I fail to 
find these words in Burke's writings. 

Note 24. " Herodotus tells that Fortune had so favored 
Poly crates, the tyrant of Samos, that his friend Amasis, king 
of Egypt, sent him word that to ward off the fate sure to follow 
unbroken prosperity, he ought to sacrifice whatever he valued 
most. Struck by this counsel, Poly crates cast into the sea his 
emerald ring. Next day it returned to him in the stomach of 
a fish sent as a present. Amasis at once broke off the alliance, 
foreseeing in this event the impending doom of Poly crates. Re- 
volt of his subjects, and civil and foreign wars followed, and 
not long after the tyrant was lured out of his domain by the 
satrap of Sardis and crucified." C. E. 

Note 25. A rhyming formula from the Latin laws of Wil- 
liam the Conqueror (hlot et scot). The general meaning is a 
contribution laid on subjects according to their ability. 

"I have paid scot and lot there any time these eighteen years." 

Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humor, III, 3. 

Note 26. See the account of the manna, Exodus XVI, 20. 

Note 27. An obsolete form of " ledger." 

Note 28. See Wordsworth's Sonnet, Near Dover, 1802. 

Note 29. This sentiment expresses Emerson's extreme in- 
dividualism and is curiously worded into paradox. " Voluntarily 
bereaving" and " traversing" are used to vindicate cause and 
effect, or separate stages of the mob's behavior. Traversing is 
used in the sense of destroying or contradicting, not in its more 
common one, of passing over. 

Note 30. "This passage, as written in the Journal, March 
19, 1839, is perhaps more fresh and vigorous: — 

11 ' Such is my confidence in the compensations of nature, that 
I no longer wish to find silver dollars in the road, nor to have the 
best of the bargain in my dealings with people, nor that my 
property should be increased, knowing that all such gains are 
apparent and not real; for they pay their sure tax. But the 
perception that it is not desirable to find the dollar I enjoy 



NOTES 137 

without any alloy. This is an abiding good: this is so much ac- 
cession of Godhead. '" C. E. 

Note 31. Naturally the suggestion is by contrary to the 
question of Cain, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis IV, 9. 

Note 32. This is very characteristic of the spiritual intre- 
pidity of Emerson's habit of mind. The assertion is almost 
stern in its emphasis. The use of "whole" is one that Carlyle 
shared with him and that is somewhat misleading. It is em- 
ployed generally, for all; not particularly or precisely, as an 
equivalent for perfect or complete. The student should read 
Holmes's poem, The Chambered Nautilus, two stanzas of which 
are, — 

"Year after year beheld the silent toil 

That spread his lustrous coil; 

Still, as the spiral grew, 
He left the past year's dwelling for the new, 
Stole with soft step its shining archway through, 

Built up its idle door, 
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. 

•'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll ! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea 1 " 

A much more commonplace expression of the duty thus de- 
scribed is to be found in Longfellow's Excelsior. The influence 
of repeated choice of the better on the soul is one of the doc- 
trines taught by Plato in dialectic and in myth. See The Sym- 
posium, and Phozdrus. The superiority of the soul to the body 
is taught in the last book of The Laws. By far the most inter- 
esting parallel for the suggestion of this passage is to be found 
in Edmund Spenser's An Hymne In Honour of Beautie, five 
stanzas of which Emerson has placed under the title Beauty in 
Parnassus. The first stanza of his selection reads : — 

"So every spirit, as it is most pure, 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and is more fairly dight 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight ; 
For of the Soul the body form doth take ; 
For Soul is form, and doth the body make." 

A careful comparison of the entire poem with this part of the 
essay will repay the student. 

Note 33. See Give All to Love: — 

f 1 When half-gods go 
The gods arrive." 



138 NOTES 

Note 34. " An East Indian fig-tree, remarkable for the area 
which individual trees cover through the development of roots 
from the branches, which descend to the ground and become 
trunks for the support and nourishment of the extending 
crown. ... As in some other tropical species of the genus, 
the seeds rarely germinate in the ground, but usually in the 
crown of palms or other trees, where they have been depos- 
ited by birds. Roots are sent down to the ground, and they 
embrace and finally kill the nurse-palm.' ' Cent. Diet. This ac- 
count seems to raise the question whether Emerson was seri- 
ously occupied with the natural history of the banian, or whether 
he did not use the word in the ornamental way so frequent with 
Milton, with his friend Carry le, and at present with Kipling. 
As to the office he assigns to the tree of his imagination, may 
he not have been influenced by the mustard of the Bible? See 
Luke XIII, 18-19: "Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom 
of God like ? and whereunto shall I resemble it? 

" It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and 
cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and 
the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it." 



EXPERIENCE 

This Essay , is one of the number published under the title 
" Second Series." Part of the account given of the series by 
Doctor Emerson in the Centenary Edition is here presented : — 

This second book of Essays followed the first by a three years' 
interval, allowing time for the rehearsal of the lectures, or 
rather the trial of them on assemblages of men and women in 
country villages, and before more cultivated, if not more criti- 
cal, audiences in the city. During that time the matter was 
often rearranged and extended, and always severely pruned. 
The book was published by James Munroe & Co., of Boston, 
in 1844. The papers of the time show that it was better re- 
ceived than either of its predecessors. The Rev. Dr. Hedge, 
writing in the Christian Examiner, praising the Essays, though 
troubled at some expressions with regard to Jesus, went so far 
as to say that they " were destined to carry far into coming 
time their lofty cheer and spirit-stirring notes of courage and 
hope." Chapman, the English publisher, had written to Mr. 
Emerson asking him to send some work not yet published, for 
which he would try to get and maintain copyright, and allow- 
half profits to the author. So the book appeared in America 
and England about the same time. 

Carlyle wrote in November: "Your English volume of Essays, 
as Chapman probably informs you by this Post, was advertised 
yesterday, ' with a Preface from me.' That is hardly accurate 
— that latter clause. My 'Preface' consists only of a certifi- 
cate that the Book is correctly printed, and sent forth by a 



NOTES 139 

Publisher of your appointment, whom therefore all readers of 
yours ought to regard accordingly. Nothing more. There proves, 
I believe, no visible real vestige of a copyright obtainable here. 
... I will say already of it, It is a sermon to me, as all your 
other deliberate utterances are; a real word, which I feel to be 
such, — alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a world all 
full of jargons, hearsays, echoes, and vain noises, which cannot 
pass with me for words. This is a praise far beyond any ' lit- 
erary' one; literary praises are not worth repeating in com- 
parison. For the rest, I have to object still (what you will call 
objecting against the Law of Nature) that we find you a Speaker 
indeed, but as it were a Soliloquizer on the eternal mountain- 
tops only, in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all 
hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only the man and the 
stars and the earth are visible, — whom, so fine a fellow seems 
he, we could perpetually punch into, and say, 'Why won't you 
come and help us then? We have terrible need of one man like 
you down among us! It is cold and vacant up there; nothing 
paintable but rainbows and emotions; come down, and you 
shall do life-pictures, passions, facts, — which transcend all 
thought, and leave it stuttering and stammering ! ' To which 
he answers that he won't, can't, and does n't want to (as the 
Cockneys have it); and so I leave him, and say, 'You Western 
Gymnosophist ! Well, we can afford one man for that too. 
But — ! ' — By the bye, I ought to say, the sentences are very 
brief; and did not, in my sheet reading, always entirely cohere 
for me. Pure genuine Saxon; strong and simple; of a clearness, 
of a beauty — But they did not, sometimes, rightly stick to 
their foregoers and their followers; the paragraph not as a 
beaten ingot, but as a beautiful square bag of duck-shot held 
together by canvas! I will try them again, with the Book delib- 
erately before me. There are also one or two utterances about 
' Jesus/ ' immortality,' and so forth, which will produce wide-eyes 
here and there. I do not say it was wrong to utter them; a 
man obeys his own Daemon in these cases as his supreme law." 
The characteristic reply of Emerson is as follows: — 

December, 1844. 

My knowledge of the defects of these things I write is all 
but sufficient to hinder me from writing at all. I am only a 
sort of lieutenant here in a deplorable absence of captains, 
and write the laws ill as thinking it a better homage than uni- 
versal silence. You Londoners know little of the dignities 
and duties of country lyceums. But of what you say now and 
heretofore respecting the remoteness of my writing and think- 
ing from real life, though I hear substantially the same criticism 
made by my countrymen, I do not know what it means. If I 
can at any time express the law and the ideal right, that should 
satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it of the 
last act of Congress. And though I sometimes accept a popu- 



140 NOTES 

lar call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, 
as lately on the 1st of August, I am sure to feel, before I have 
done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere, and 
so much loss of virtue in my own. 

A part of Doctor Emerson's account of the essay on Expe- 
rience is : — 

"This essay was written at one of the critical epochs of Mr. 
Emerson's life. 'The Angel troubled the pool.' The old and 
the new were contending in him. His growth was not without 
pain. He bore 'the yoke of conscience masterful,' and this 
inheritance he fortunately could not shake off. But his sudden 
intellectual growth possibly made the yoke gall at times. He 
had cut loose from tradition and experienced the difficulties 
attendant on trying to live only according to each day's oracle. 
Life became experimental, and manifold experiments were 
suggested in that period of spiritual and social upheaval. He 
was severely tried in these years. In many places in his jour- 
nals he gratefully recognizes his debt to the Puritan tradition 
of a virtuous ancestry and their inherited impulse. This carried 
him through the whirlpools or sloughs in which he saw many 
of the sons of the morning of that day sink. Grief came to him 
in heavy form — the death of his first-born child, of wonderful 
promise and charm. In this essay, which presents moods and 
aspects in an unusual degree of contrast, and of which he says, 
' I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter,' he speaks of 
the speedy healing of this wound and his grieving at the slight- 
ness of the scar left. In his desire for utter freedom from hypo- 
crisy, he makes an overstrong statement. But his health and 
faith and great power of detachment shortened and soothed his 
suffering. 

"He passed through this epoch of unrest bravely, and came 
soon into that serene strength and happiness which remained 
for life. 

" I find no record of this essay delivered as a lecture. A very 
small part of it was taken from Being and Seeming in the 
course on ' Human Culture ' in 1837-38. 

" The motto would seem to have been written after the essay. 
The 'lords of life' are named a little more fully in a paragraph 
near its closing portion. This image of a passing of demigods 
in procession pleased Emerson's fancy, and he often used it. 
The last lines show him aware of the unrestful character of the 
piece, and in sure faith of a harmonious solution of the diffi- 
culties on a better day. 

• The dear, dangerous lords that rule our life ' 

are spoken of in his poem Musketaquid" 

Note 1. " Rhea having accompanied with Saturn by stealth, 
the Sun found them out, and pronounced a solemn curse against 
her, containing that she should not be delivered in any month 



NOTES 141 

or year; but Hermes afterwards making his court to the god- 
dess, obtained her favor, in requital of which he went and 
played at dice with the Moon and won of her the seventieth 
part from each day, and out of all these made five new days, 
which he added to the three hundred and sixty other days of 
the year, and these the Egyptians . . . observe as the birth- 
days of their gods. Upon the first of these, as they say, Osiris 
was born, and a voice came into the world with him, saying, 
'The Lord of all things is now born.'" — Plutarch's Morals, 
"Of Isis and Osiris." C. E. 

Note 2. This use of the word " reference " is unexpected to 
the conventional reader. Its etymology and suggestion justify 
the use, however. Possibly Emerson had in mind the circum- 
locution offices where inquiry is referred from one point to an- 
other, as well as the habit of mind which shirks responsibility 
and refuses to be authoritative or ultimate. His scorn of apol- 
ogy and evasion is characteristic. 

Note 3. The first, Girolamo Tiraboschi, was a distinguished 
Italian professor of literature, born at Bergamo, Italy, 1731, 
died near Modena, 1794: the second, Thomas Warton, 1728- 
1790, a poet, critic, and historian of English literature; the 
third, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel, 1772-1829, or 
more probably, his brother, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, 1767- 
1845. The works by which they are respectively best known 
are Geschichte der alien und neuen Liter atur (Friedrich), and 
translations from Shakespeare and Calderon (August). 

Note 4. According to Hesiod, a daughter of Eris; according 
to Homer, of Zeus. An ancient Greek divinity who led both 
gods and men to rash and inconsiderate actions and to suffering. 
By Zeus she was hurled from Olympus and banished forever 
from the abodes of the gods. In the tragic writers, she appears 
as the avenger of evil deeds, inflicting just punishments upon 
offenders and their posterity. Here her character is almost the 
same as that of Nemesis and Erinnys. She is said by competent 
critics to be the most prominent in the dramas of ^Eschylus 
and least so in those of Euripides, where the idea of justice is 
more fully developed. In one of his letters to his wife Emerson 
expresses the thought in a different way: " We fat on our failures 
and by our dumbness we speak." 

Note 5. Doctor Emerson says: "The source of these lines 
cannot be found." 

Note 6. Boscovich, Ruggiero Giuseppe, 1711-1787. An 
Italian Jesuit, mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. Two 
of his works are Theoria philosophiae naturalis, and De maculis 
solaribus. 

Note 7. This e^.nt occurred January 27, 1842, and was 
for the time an overwhelming blow which first seemed to de- 
prive the father of expression and then was the inspiration of 
the Threnody, Emerson's poem that ranks with Lycidas and 
Captain ! My Captain ! The bereaved Emerson wrote to a 



142 NOTES 

friend: "The innocent and beautiful should not be sourly and 
gloomily lamented, but with music and fragrant thoughts and 
sportive recollections. Alas ! I chiefly grieve that I cannot 
grieve. Dear boy, too precious and unique a creation to be 
huddled aside into the waste and prodigality of things; yet 
his image, so gentle, so rich in hopes, blends easily with every 
happy moment, every fair remembrance, every cherished 
friendship, of my life. Calm and wise, calmly and wisely happy, 
the beautiful Creative Power looked out from him, and spoke 
of anything but chaos and interruption. What was the moral 
of sun and moon, of roses and acorns, that was the moral of 
the sweet boy's life; softened only and humanized by blue eyes 
and infant eloquence." 

In 1844 he wrote in a letter to Miss Fuller: "When last Sat- 
urday night, Lidian (Mrs. Emerson) said, ' It is two years to-day,' 
I only heard the bell-stroke again. I have had no experience, 
no progress to put me into better intelligence with my calamity 
than when it was new. . . . But the inarticulateness of the 
Supreme Power, how can we insensate hearers, perceivers, and 
thinkers ever reconcile ourselves unto? It deals all too lightly 
with us low-levelled and weaponed men. Does the Power labor 
as men do with the impossibility of perfect application, that 
always the hurt is of one kind and the compensation of another? 
My divine temple, which all angels seemed to love to rebuild, 
and which was shattered in a night, I can never rebuild: and 
is the facility of entertainment from thought, or friendship, or 
affairs an amends? Rather it seems like a cup of Somnus or of 
Momus. Yet the nature of things, against all appearances and 
specialities whatever, assures us of eternal benefit. But these 
affirmations are tacit and secular; if spoken, they have a hollow 
and canting sound. And thus all our being, dear friend, is ever- 
more adjourned. Patience, and patience, and patience ! I will 
try, since you ask it, to copy my rude dirges to my darling, 
and send them to you." From James Elliot Cabot's A Memmr 
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. II, p. 483. 

Note 8. See Southey's The Curse of Kehama, II, The Curse, 
14ff.: — 

" I charm thy life 

From the weapons of strife, 

From stone and from wood, 

From fire and from flood, 

From the serpent's tooth, 

And the beasts of blood : 

From sickness I charm thee , 

And time shall not harm thee ; 

But Earth which is mine, 

Its fruits shall deny thee ; 

And water shall hear me, 

And know thee and fly thee ; 

And the winds shall not touch thee 

When they pass by thee, 

And the dews shall not wet thee 



NOTES 143 

When they fall nigh thee ; 
And thou shalt seek Death 
To release thee in vain 1 
Thou shalt live in thy pain, 
While Kehama shall reign, 
With a fire in thy heart, 
And a fire in thy brain; 
And Sleep shall obey me 
And visit thee never ; 
And the Curse shall be on thee 
For ever and ever." 

Note 9. In full, Santa Maria de Belem do Grao Para. The 
seaport capital of Para, Brazil, the centre of the river trade of 
the Amazon system, exporting rubber, cacao, copaiba balsam, 
hides, nuts, etc. Founded in 1615. An elaborately decorative 
designation for storm coats. Possibly illustrative of Emerson's 
stately manners and ceremonious address. 

Note 10. Shelley's Adonais, LII, reads as follows: — 

"The one remains, the many change and pass: 
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly; 
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, ' 
Stains the white radiance of eternity, 
Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die, 
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seekt 
Follow where all is fled ! Rome's azure sky, 
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words are weak 
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak." 

Note 11. The reference is to Doctor Gamaliel Bradford. C. E. 

Note 12. "The soul is its own witness." — Laws of Menu, 
printed among the "Ethnical Scriptures" in the Dial. C. E. 

Note 13. The vigorous phrasing in this passage is reminis- 
cent of Milton, Comus, 1. 77, "To roll with pleasure in a sensual 
sty." The later reference to the intervention of intellect for the 
help of the struggler also suggests the sentiments of the Elder 
Brother in the same poem: — 

" Virtue could see to do what Virtue would 
By her own radiant light, though sun and moon 
Were in the flat sea sunk." 

Note 14. See Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. IV, 73 ff.: — 

".Which way shall I fly 
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? 
Which way I fly is hell ; myself am hell ; 
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep, 
Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, 
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven." 

Note 15. Nevertheless it moves. The now famous words of 
Galileo after his retraction before the Inquisition of the heresy 
of teaching that the earth was not stationary but moved around 
the sun. 



144 NOTES 

Note 16. The reference is to Elizabeth or Bettina von Arnim, 
1785-1850, a German writer principally noted for her corre- 
spondence with Goethe. Her acquaintance with him lasted 
from 1807 to 1811. After Goethe's death she published an ex- 
tensive correspondence for which, however, she could never 
produce the originals of the letters. It is said of her that " her 
vanity, caprice, mendacity, and utter want of principle can 
only be excused on the supposition of her virtual irresponsi- 
bility for her actions. She possessed a brilliant fancy, and her 
remarks occasionally display great penetration; her conver- 
sational powers are described as marvellous." This accounts 
for Emerson's "even" in connection with her name. 

Note 17. Sentiments like these have been objected to on 
the ground that Emerson really did not properly understand 
or value art, as would appear from the latter part of his essay on 
Shakespeare and from the one on Art. Such statements are cited 
as these: "Shall I now add that the whole extant product of 
the plastic arts has herein its highest value, as history; as a 
stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful, 
according to whose ordinations all beings advance to their 
beatitude?" . . . "There is higher work for Art than the arts. 
They are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct." 
..." Would it not be better to begin higher up, — to serve the 
ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in eating 
and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of 
life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the dis- 
tinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten." 
The upholders of art for art's sake and the globe-trotters in 
search of culture by Baedeker have made short work of these 
declarations, but time is justifying the homing instinct of 
Emerson. His doctrine touches Plato and his Greeks in one 
direction and reaches out to Whistler, in his Ten O'clock (Lon- 
don, February 10, 1885), and the art theories of functional 
psychologists, as represented by Henry Sturt in Art and Per- 
sonality published with other essays under the title Personal 
Idealism (Macmillan Co.). He says in one place: "Primarily 
the person for whom art is valuable is the artist himself. If 
anyone asked, For whom was Shakespeare's artistic life a good? 
the answer would be: In the first place, for Shakespeare. And 
this is not an exceptional rule for exceptional men, but merely 
the common rule for the valuation of human life. We cannot 
say of the rank and file of humanity that A's life is valuable 
because it furthers the lives of B, C, and D, and so on. Nor 
can we say it of the chiefs." 

Note 18. Emerson's self-respecting recognition of the ex- 
ceptional character of his own social relations is touched on 
here. It appears again in his poem of the Visit, and in a letter 
to Margaret Fuller, he says: "Ice has its uses, when deception 
is not thought of and we are not looking for bread. Being 
made by chemistry and not by cooks, its composition is un- 



NOTES 145 

erring, and it has a universal value, as ice, not as glass or gel- 
atine. . . . Therefore, my friend, treat me always as a mute, 
not ungrateful though now incommunicable." 

Note 19. Henry Sturt in the essay already cited writes: 
"As causes of ordinary bad taste we may enumerate Fossil- 
ism, that is, a stupid adherence to artistic forms that may have 
been very well in their day, but should now be abandoned for 
others more adequate; Vuglarity, which leads us to prefer forms 
conducive to self-glorification; Crankiness, or the undue in- 
sistence on some element which has only a subordinate value. 
None of these kinds of bad taste has any special philosophical 
significance. Their valuation is at bottom the standard valu- 
ation stunted or distorted. They have no strength of convic- 
tion, no principle to oppose to us." 

Note 20. A lime-soda feldspar (labradorite) . It is rarely 
found crystallized, but usually in masses, and these often show a 
brilliant change of colors; on this account it is sometimes used 
as an ornamental stone. The finest specimens come from the 
coast of Labrador, whence the name. Cent. Diet. 

Note 21. The same idea is expressed in Compensation: " Such 
also is the natural history of calamity" et seq. Compare these 
passages to get the different points of view. 

Note 22. Same as "dialectic." The Century Dictionary says, 
" Dialectic was limited by Aristotle to logic accommodated to 
the uses of the rhetorician, appealing pnly to general belief, but 
not to first principles." 

Note 23. Here is meant Brook Farm at West Roxbury, 
Mass. The Brook Farm Association in 1841 made an experiment 
in agriculture and education in the interests of plain living and 
high thinking. The organization broke up in 1847. 

Note 24. The Centenary Edition notes this as probably from 
some of the sayings ascribed to Zoroaster. 

Note 25. This passage presents another aspect of the state- 
ment in Compensation: " Under the primeval despots of Egypt, 
history honestly confesses that man must have been as free as 
culture could make him." 

Note 26. Cf.— 

".Life is a jest, and all things show it ; 
I thought so once, but now I know it." 

My Own Epitaph, John Gay. 

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep." 

The Tempest, Act IV, Sc. 1. 



146 NOTES 

Note 27. This is clearly on 3 of the phases of experience in 
which the dualism mentioned in Compensation appears. 

Note 28. Earlier in this essay the phrase "perpetual re- 
treating and reference" occurs. The rhetorical and logical 
relations are interesting. 

Note 29. What may happen to be in the pot; a meal where 
no preparation has been made for guests, hence any chance 
provision. 

Note 30. Poussin, Nicolas, 1594-1665. A French historical 
and landscape painter, decorator of the Grande Galerie in the 
Louvre, favored by Louis XIII. The Deluge and The Rape 
of the Sabines are two of his pictures. 

Note 3 1 . Salvator Rosa , 1 61 5 ( ?)- 1 673 , painter, musician, and 
satirist. The Conspiracy of Catiline, in the Pitti is considered 
his masterpiece. 

Note 32. The Transfiguration, a famous painting: by Ra- 
phael in the Vatican; The Last Judgment, a great picture by 
Michelangelo on the end wall above the high altar in the 
Sistine Chapel; The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, a picture 
by Domenichino in the Vatican; or possibly the picture by 
Agostino Carracci of which Domenichino's has been said to be a 
plagiarism. Carracci's picture is in Bologna. 

Note 33. A famous art gallery in Florence, founded in the 
fifteenth century. It is connected with the galleries in the Pitti 
palace by a covered gallery over the Ponte Vecchio. 

Note 34. " Molecular force is a force acting between mole- 
cules, but insensible at sensible distances." Cent, Diet. The 
force of the word "new" is to be found in the fact that the* 
underlying conception of force in the atomic theory of matter 
is opposed to the teaching of the ancients, and w not yet de- 
monstratively established in its details and applications, Buf- 
fon, Clerk-Maxwell, Lockyer, and Sir William Thomson have 
all contributed to this philosophy. The recent investigations of 
radium are extensions of it. 

Note 35. This is perhaps an instance of Emerson's alert 
sense of values and distinctions in lines of study not his own. 
The grammatical use of "strong" applies to the past tense, but 
Emerson employs the term out of its setting for his own pur- 
poses. 

Note 36. The right by law to the produce of man's intellect- 
ual industry and the protection of it from use by others without 
adequate compensation. The first copyright was the English* 
statute of 1709. International copyright protects an author 
residing in one country from trespass in such other countries as 
are parties to the arrangement. 

Note 37. Cf. Milton's Areopagitica: "What is to he thought 
in general of reading, whatever sort the books be; . . . I deny 
not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Com- 
monwealth. I have a vigilant eye how books demean them- 
selves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and 



NOTES 147 

do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not 
absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them 
to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, 
they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction 
of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as 
lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons* 
teeth; and being sown up and down, they may chance to spring 
up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unless wariness 
be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book : who 
kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he 
who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image 
of God as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the 
earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master 
spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond 
life." 

Note 38. The reader naturally expects to find thy stint. 
The use of the demonstrative instead of the personal pronoun 
illustrates Emerson's characteristic impersonality. Man shall 
not appropriate even the duty that lies nearest him. He and it 
are but aspects of the forces and relations treated in The Over- 
Soul and in Circles, illustrated by examples in Representative 
Men. The word "stint" is given as obsolete or dialectic in the 
dictionaries, but it was a favorite device of Emerson's thus to 
express the external claim of practical obligation. In his Mis- 
cellanies is, "In the divided or social state, these functions are 
parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint 
of the joint work." 

Note 39. Cf . — 

"His form had not yet lost 
All her original brightness, nor appeared 
Less than Archangel ruined, and th' excess 
Of glory obscured." 

Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. I, 591. 



also, — 
also, — 



"Dark with excessive bright." 

Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. Ill, 380 

'He saw; but, blasted with excess of light, 
Closed his eyes in endless night." 

Gray, The Progress of Poesy, III, 2, 1. 4. 



Note 40. This is a paraphrase of the idea later given in the 
quotation from Luke xvii, 20. 

Note 41. This perhaps seems contradictory of Emerson's 
doctrine of Self-Reliance and destructive of the emphasis which 
in Compensation he puts on decision and individual authority, 
but the contradiction is only apparent. The individual must 
err in order to learn, he must suffer calamity if he would succeed. 
The intrepidity to be wrong while one learns to be greatly right 
is one of the aspects of Emerson's spiritual courage. A passage 
from Milton is in point: "This I know, that errours in a good 



148 NOTES 

government and in a bad are equally almost incident; for what 
magistrate may not be misinformed, and much the sooner, if 
liberty of printing be reduced into the power of a few. But 
to redress willingly and speedily what hath been erred, and in 
highest authority to esteem a plain advertisement more than 
others have done a sumptuous pride, is a virtue . . . whereof 
none can participate but greatest and wisest men." 

Note 42. A Scottish surgeon and writer on Comparative 
Anatomy, supposed to have been mainly indebted for his know- 
ledge to the manuscripts of his brother-in-law, John Hunter, 
which he burned. C. E. 

Note 43. The capital of Arabia, the birthplace of Moham- 
med, the site of the Kaaba. It is situated in a sandy valley 
seventy miles from the Red Sea. 

Note 44. Antigone, in Sophocles's tragedy, reproached by 
Creon for burying her outlawed brother's body, says, " Nor did 
I think thy proclamation, since thou art a mortal, of force to 
outweigh the unwritten and secure laws of the gods, for these 
are not matters of now and yesterday, but always were, and no 
man knows whence they came." C. E. 

Note 45. Thales of Miletus, 640-546 b. c, one of the 
seven wise men of Greece, the earliest of the Ionian natural 
philosophers. Discoveries in astronomy and geometry are 
attributed to him as well as a prediction of an eclipse of the 
sun, May 28, 585 b. c. 

Note 46. Anaxagoras, 500-428 b. c, a great Greek philo- 
sopher, the friend and teacher of Pericles, Thucydides, and 
Euripides. He was banished from Athens on a charge of impiety. 

Note 47. Zoroaster — Zarathushtra, the founder of the Perso- 
Iranian national religion. It is still represented in Persia, Rus- 
sian Transcaucasia, and India. 

Note 48. Latinized form of Meng-tse, d. c. 289 b. c, one of 
the most noted expounders of Confucianism. 

Note 49. This is high and hard doctrine, but it is the teach- 
ing of the New Testament that a man must leave wife and 
children and houses and lands for the kingdom of heaven's 
sake. Cf. Tennyson in In Memoriam, XL VII : — 

"That each, who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
The skirts of self again, should fall 
Remerging in the general Soul, 

" Is faith as vague as all unsweet: 
Eternal form shall still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside; 
And I shall know him when we meet: 

"... He seeks at least 

" Upon the last and sharpest height, 
Before the spirits fade away, 
Some landing-place, to clasp and say, 
! Farewell 1 we lose ourselves in light.' " 



NOTES 149 

Note 50. Denying the obligation to obey the moral law — 
the distinction precisely is, against or above the law. 

Note 51. Hermes, in Greek mythology, son of Zeus and 
Maia, herald and messenger of the gods, protector of herdsmen, 
god of science, commerce, invention, and the arts of life, patron 
of travelers and rogues. Cadmus, son of Agenor, king of 
Phenicia and Telephassa, founder of Thebes in Boeotia, and 
inventor of the alphabet. Columbus, 1446(?)-1506, sailor, 
discoverer, colonizer, student, statesman, Christian. He never 
knew that the land he discovered in 1492 was not part of Asia. 
Newton, 1642-1727, English mathematician and natural phi- 
losopher, author of the Principia, member of Parliament, 
Warden of the Mint, author of the theory of universal gravi- 
tation. Bonaparte, Napoleon I, 1769(?)-1821, Emperor of the 
French, whose brilliant career and whose baffling character 
served Emerson as the ideal of a man of the world. This list 
may be compared with similar devices in Walt Whitman's 
rhetoric, in Milton's or in Sir Thomas Browne's. Emerson's 
structure has a central point from which the qualities vary to 
either extreme. Cf. Milton: "It is no new thing never heard 
of before, for a parochial minister, who has his reward, is at 
his Hercules pillars in a warm benefice, to be easily inclinable, 
if he have nothing else that may rouse up his studies, to finish 
his circuit in an English Concordance and a topic folio, the 
gatherings and savings of a sober graduateship, a Harmony 
and a Catena treading the constant round of certain common 
doctrinal heads, attended with their uses, motives, marks, and 
means; out of which, as out of an alphabet or Sol fa, by forming 
and transforming, joining and disjoining variously, a little 
bookcraft and two hours meditation might furnish him un- 
speakably to the performance of more than a weekly charge 
of sermoning: not to reckon up the infinite helps of interliniaries, 
breviaries, synopses, and other loitering gear." 

Cf. Whitman : — 

"Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of the mighty 
Niagara, 

Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong - 
breasted bull, 

Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my 
amaze, 

Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the flight of the mountain- 
hawk, 

And heard at dawn the unrivall'd one, the hermit-thrush from the swamp- 
cedars, 

Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World." 

Cf. Sir Thomas Browne: "But certainly false it is, what is 
commonly affirmed and believed, that garlic doth hinder the 
attraction of the loadstone; which is, notwithstanding, delivered 
by grave and worthy writers, by Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemy, 



150 NOTES 

Plutarch, Albertus, Malthiolus, Rescus, Longius, and many 
more. An effect as strange as that of Homer's Moly, and the 
garlic that Mercury bestowed upon Ulysses." 

Note 52. A characteristic suggestion of detail associated in 
Emerson's mind with Newton's use of Kepler's laws. 

Note 53. John Flaxman, 1755-1826, a famous English 
sculptor and draftsman. "For pure conceptive faculty, con- 
trolled by unerring sense of beauty, we have to think of Pheidias 
or Raphael before we find his equal," says Symonds, in Studies 
of the Greek Poets. Henry James, in his Life of Hawthorne, calls 
somewhat contemptuous attention to the pleasures derived by 
members of the Concord society of Emerson's day from bend- 
ing over Flaxman's "attenuated outlines." 

Note 54. This list of abstract terms is a doubtful aid to the 
reader in interpreting the course of Emerson's treatment of 
Experience. It is certainly a final challenge to the curiosity and 
ingenuity of the critic to make out their function or their iden- 
tity as " the lords of life." 

Note 55. A name for Nemesis, derived, according to some 
authorities, from Adrastus, the builder of the first temple to 
Nemesis, by others from the verb diSpdaneeiv. In this last con- 
nection emphasis is put upon the inevitable power of the god- 
dess who spares none. In the Phsedrus of Plato, the myth deal- 
ing with the truth about the affections and actions of the soul 
represents it as of composite nature — a pair of winged horses 
and a charioteer. " And there is a law of the goddess Retri- 
bution, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in 
company with the god is preserved from harm until the next 
period, and he who always attains is always unharmed. But 
when she is unable to follow, and fails to behold the vision of 
truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath the double load 
of forge tfulness and vice, and her feathers fall from her and she 
drops to earth, then the law ordains that this soul shall in the 
first generation pass, not into that of any other animal, but 
only of man." B. Jowett, Tr., The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. I. 



CHARACTER 

The essay on Character is in part a lecture of the same title 
in the course on The Times, delivered in Masonic Temple, 
Boston, 1841-42. 

The first motto is part of an unpublished poem. The Poet. — 
The second motto is part of a poem in memory of Edward Bliss 
Emerson, who died in Porto Rico in 1834. See Centenary Edi- 
tion. An essay under this title was the concluding lecture of 
a course given before the Parker Fraternity by Emerson in 
Boston, 1864-65. 

Note 1. William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, 1708-1778. A 
great orator and statesman of England. He was a Whig and 



NOTES 151 

known as the Great Commoner before his elevation to the 
peerage. He opposed the policy pursued towards the American 
colonies, but protested against the acknowledgment of their 
independence. 

Note 2. The reference is to Thomas Carlyle. 

Note 3. Mirabeau, Comte de, Gabriel Honore Riquetti, 1749- 
1791, the most eloquent orator of the French Revolution. He 
was President of the Jacobin Club and of the National Assembly. 

Note 4. The Gracchi, Caius Sempronius, and Tiberius Sem- 
pronius, sons of Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus Major. 
They interested themselves in the agrarian troubles of their 
time, c. 133 b. c. Both were killed in their efforts to carry out 
their political measures. 

Note 5. King of Sparta, b. c. 244. Sentenced to death by 
the ephors in consequence of his efforts for unpopular military 
and agrarian reform. 

Note 6. Two famous kings of Sparta bore this name. One, 
Cleomenes I, expelled Hippias from Athens in 510. Another, 
Cleomenes III, abolished the ephorate, fought the Achaean 
League, and was defeated at Sellasia, 221. 

Note 7. Plutarch, of Chseronea, b. c. 46 a. d., a Greek his- 
torian, author of Parallel Lives of forty-six Greeks and Romans. 
He was also a moralist. Emerson refers frequently to his works 
and admired his Platonist habit of thought. 

Note 8. Sir Philip Sidney, 1554-1586, an English writer 
and soldier. A gallant and generous man. His principal works 
are the Arcadia, Astrophel and Stella, and the Defence of Poesie. 

Note 9. The Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, second Earl, 
1567-1601. He was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, fell into 
disfavor, and was executed on charge of treason. 
^ Note 10. Sir Walter Raleigh, 1552-1618. An English cour- 
tier, soldier, colonizer, and writer. He was a favorite of Eliza- 
beth. He organized colonizing expeditions to Virginia, Trinidad, 
and Guiana and the Orinoco. After the failure of his venture 
to Orinoco, he was condemned and executed. 

Note 11. Schiller, 1759-1805, a famous German poet and 
writer of history and drama. He was a friend of Goethe and has 
exerted an almost equally strong influence upon the culture of 
our time. The Transcendentalists were all deeply interested in 
Schiller and the group of his contemporaries to whom they had 
been emphatically directed by Thomas Carlyle in his essays 
and criticisms of German literature. This collection of names 
undoubtedly has significance of many kinds, but the value that 
it has for its sound must not be overlooked. The names are 
vaguely eminent, but perhaps none the less impressive to the 
general reader for all that. Several of them are known to the 
plain person rather by the company they keep with reputations 
he does know than for their own deserts. They do not illustrate, 
they stimulate by requiring explanation. 

Note 12. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy elaborates a 



152 NOTES 

similar idea. Cf. Pt. 1, Sec. 2, Mem. 1, Subs. 2, and Pt. 1, Sec. 3, 
Mem. 1, Subs. 4. 

Note 13. The story of Iole is told in the Trachinice of Sopho- 
cles, but the form given to it here is believed by Doctor Edward 
Emerson to be of his father's invention. See C. E. 

Note 14. Probably an allusion to Daniel Webster. 

Note 15. This reiterated emphasis on fact was almost a man- 
nerism of the group of writers and thinkers led by Emerson and 
Carlyle. The recurrence of the word "fact" is nearly as signifi- 
cant in their expression as is "sense" in the writing inspired 
by Alexander Pope. The "eternal veracities" are familiar 
to the reader of Carlyle. Emerson preferred " fact." 

Note 16. This is another expression of Emerson's objection 
to "reference" and "retreating" in Experience. In Education, 
he writes: . . . "the day of facts is a rock of diamonds; ... a 
fact is an Epiphany of God." 

Note 17. This entire passage is reminiscent of Burke. Com- 
pare the analytical and descriptive parts of the Speech on Con- 
ciliation dealing with the resources of the American colonies. 

Note 18. Probably a reference to one of the features of mes- 
merism, so-called from F. A. Mesmer, a German physician, pro- 
pounder of the doctrine in 1778. He held that influence could 
be exerted by one person over the will and nervous system of 
another by virtue of an emanation called animal magnetism. 
Most of what was taught or practised by Mesmer has been dis- 
credited or reaffirmed on more satisfactory scientific grounds 
by the students of hypnotism, first brought to public notice in 
1880. Emerson's allusion is characteristic. He spiritualized 
phenomena which, familiar as they may have been to Plato, were 
in his time, as in Emerson's, put to ignoble uses and vulgarized 
by sensual accompaniments. This characterization, delivered 
in 1841, published in 1844, as well as the one on Demonology, 
1838-39, is naturally associated with the treatment of the same 
theme by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The House of the Seven 
Gables (1851), chapter xiii, "Alice Fyncheon." Significant ex- 
tracts are: "Now the wizard's grandson, the young Matthew 
Maule of our story, was popularly supposed to have inherited 
some of his ancestor's questionable traits. . . . He was fabled, 
for example, to have a strange power of getting into people's 
dreams, and regulating matters there according to his own 
fancy, pretty much like the stage-manager of a theatre. ... 
Some said that he could look into people's minds; others that 
by the marvellous power of this eye, he could draw people into 
his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do errands to his 
grandfather, in the spiritual world; others again, that it was what 
is called an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty of 
blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the 
heartburn. . . . ' There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep! Now 
let Matthew Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter 
found her awhile since.' He spoke, and Alice responded, with a 



NOTES 153 

soft, subdued, inward acquiescence, and a bending of her form 
towards him, like the flame of a torch when it indicates a gentle 
draught of air. He beckoned with his hand, and rising from 
her chair, — blindly, but undoubtingly, as tending to her sure 
and inevitable centre, — the proud Alice approached him. He 
waved her back, and retreating, Alice sank again into her seat. 
'She is mine!' said Matthew Maule. 'Mine, by the right of the 
strongest spirit! ' " 

In chapter vi of his biography of Cotton Mather, Barrett 
Wendell deals with the Salem witchcraft. Bearing on this point 
he says: "At various periods of history epidemics of superstition 
have appeared, sometimes in madly tragic forms, sometimes, 
as in modern spiritualism, in grotesquely comic ones. . . . 
Oracles, magic, witchcraft, animal magnetism, spiritualism, — 
call the phenomena what you will, — seem to me a fact. Certain 
phases of it are beginning to be understood under the name of 
hypnotism. Other phases, after the best study that has been 
given them, seem to be little else than deliberate fraud and false- 
hood; but they are fraud and falsehood, if this be all they are, 
of a specific kind, unchanged for centuries. . . . And some of 
them are very like what are related in the trials of the Salem 
witches. So specific is the fraud, if only fraud it be, that it may 
well be regarded, I think, as a distinct mental, or perhaps rather 
moral disorder." His explanation of the conditions on evolu- 
tionary grounds follows, pp. 95-97. 

A recent contribution to the subject is Dissociated Person- 
ality, by Doctor Morton Prince. 

Note 19. The reference is to Leonora, wife of the Marquis 
d'Ancre, accused of sorcery in the influence she exerted over 
the queen of Henry IV. 

Note 20. Seemingly names used by Emerson to illustrate 
his point vividly. 

Note 21. See Wordsworth's fine sonnet to his memory. 
He lived 1743-1803, was a negro slave of rudimentary educa- 
tion and natural genius as a statesman and commander of 
men. In 1798, the British treated with him as the real ruler of 
Haiti. He was subdued by Napoleon and died in prison. 

Note 22. In the Song of Myself, 1. 20, Walt Whitman writes: 

"Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel'd with doc- 
tors and calculated close, 
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones," 

Note 23. This is the appropriate illustration of the general 
statement made in Compensation. "These appearances indi- 
cate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its 
particles." 

Note 24. Serving as an aid, adjunct, or accessory; subser- 
vient, auxiliary; supplementary. 

Note 25. See James ii, 19; " The devils also believe and 
tremble." 



154 NOTES 

Note 26. This phrase has new significance since the publi- 
cation of Ibsen's play known in its English translation as The 
Doll's House. Nora's final revolt is in the general line of Emer- 
son's contention for the non-conformity of the soul. 

Note 27. Probably Mr. George Ripley, head of the Brook 
Farm Association, is alluded to here. 

Note 28. The use of "fact" here as antithetical to "city 
still," should be noted. 

Note 29. Compare Robert Browning's elaboration of a simi- 
lar theme in Balaustion's Adventure : — 

" Herakles 
Had flung into the presence, frank and free, 
Out from the labor into the repose, 
Ere out again and over head and ears 
I' the heart of labor, all for love of men: 
Making the most o' the minute, that the soul 
And body, strained to height a minute since, 
Might lie relaxed in joy, this breathing space, 
For man's sake more than ever; till the bow, 
Restrung o' the sudden, at first cry for help, 
Should send some unimaginable shaft 
True to the aim and shatteringly through 
The plate-mail of a monster, save man so. 
He slew the pest o' the marish yesterday: 
To-morrow he would bit the flame-breathed stud 
That fed on man's flesh: and this day between — 
Because he held it natural to die, 
And fruitless to lament a thing past cure, 
So, took his fill of food, wine, song, and flowers, 
Till the new labor claimed him soon enough, — 
'.Hate him and justly ! ' " 

Note 30. The Centenary Edition notes this passage in 
Prayer : — 

"When success exalts thy lot 
God for thy virtue lays a plot." 

It must be admitted, however, that this is a "hard saying." 
Nor does it conform to our present doctrine of diffused social 
sympathy and personal ease and congeniality as its natural 
expression. 

Note 31. That is, at the mercy of an antagonist or enemy; 
to surrender at discretion is to surrender without terms. This 
martial phrase has an odd sound on Emerson's tranquil lips, 
but it represents well the wide range of his interests and the 
equanimity of his intelligence. 

Note 32. This phrase is an excellent example of Emerson's 
constructive skill exercised in conditions of great rhetorical 
danger — most writers would have been reminded of Argus- 
eyed, as undoubtedly was Emerson, and they would have ac- 
cepted the suggestion while he repulsed it, but made use of it 
in this admirable one. In Self -Reliance occurs " thousand-fold 
Relief Societies " and " thousand-eyed present." Thus Emerson's 
rhetoric illustrates his own " centrality " of thought. 



NOTES 155 

Note 33. Patmos, an island of the iEgean Sea from which 
the Revelation of St. John the Divine is reported to have 
come. Here he is supposed to have seen the visions of the 
Apocalypse. Emerson's phrase is enriched by the suggestion 
of the conventional antithesis between thought and vision. 

Note 34. The Reverend Edward Taylor of the Sailors' 
Bethel in Boston. 

Note 35. Messrs. Lane and Wright, two English visitors 
interested in the transcendental conception of society and 
desirous of realizing it in some form of community life. 

Note 36. This is one of Emerson's most personal confessions. 
His faith in possible greatness made him quick to give recog- 
nition to claims of originality. The letter he wrote to Walt 
Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass is a good example of 
his attitude. His lifelong championship of Mr. Alcott is an- 
other. So anxious was he lest some expression of genius should 
escape him that he seemed over-credulous and uncritical to 
observers of less ardent hope. 

Concord, Mass., July 21, 1855. 

Dear Sir, — I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful 
gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece 
of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am 
very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. 
It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the 
sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too 
much lymph in the temperament were making our Western 
wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your fine and brave 
thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things, 
said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage 
of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception 
only can inspire. 

I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet 
must have had a long foreground, somewhere, for such a start. 
I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illu- 
sion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It 
has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging. 

I did not know, until I last night saw the book advertised in 
a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available 
for a post office. 

I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking 
my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects. 

R. W. Emerson. 

Note 37. This passage is quoted from " The Book of Shet 
the Prophet Zirtusht," in the second volume of The Desatir, or 
Sacred Writings of the Ancient Persian Prophets, together with 
the Ancient Persian Version and Commentary of the Fifth Sasan t 
carefully published by Mulla Firuz Bin Kaus. Bombay, 1818. 

As the book is exceedingly rare, I give the whole passage. 
"It is said that when the fame of the excellence of the nature 



156 NOTES 

of Zertusht had spread all over the world, and when Isfendiar 
went around the world, erected fire-temples and raised domes 
over the fires, the wise men of Yunan selected a Sage named 
Tutianush, who at that time had the superiority in acquire- 
ments over them all, to go to Iran and to enquire of Zertusht 
concerning the real nature of things. If he was puzzled and 
unable to answer, he could be no prophet, but if he returned 
an answer, he was a speaker of truth." (Here follows the 
passage quoted in the text.) " He then asked the day of the 
prophet's nativity. The prophet of God told it. He said, ' On 
such a day, and under such a fortunate star a deceiver can- 
not be born.' He next enquired into his diet and mode of life. 
The prophet of God explained the whole. The Sage said, ' His 
mode of life cannot suit an impostor/ The prophet of Yezdan 
then said to him, 'I have answered you the questions which 
you have put to me; now in return retain in your mind what 
the famed Yunani Sage directed you to enquire of Zertusht and 
disclose it not, but listen and hear what they ask; for God hath 
informed me of it and hath sent his word unto me to unfold it.' 
The Sage said, ' Speak.' Thereupon the prophet of Zertusht 
repeated the . . . texts." C. E. 

Note 38. This is found in the Timceus. 

Note 39. This quotation is used again by Emerson in the 
eulogy on Samuel Hoar. 

Note 40. Furniture in the sense of that with which anything 
is supplied to fit it for operation or use; equipment. The use of 
the word to designate the spiritual powers as opposed to ex- 
ternal equipment is characteristic of Emerson and peculiarly 
his in this particular combination of words. 

Note 41. See Homer's Odyssey, Bk. V, 1. 99. 

Note 42. See Initial, Daemonic and Celestial Love. 

Note 43. A household officer of a prince or dignitary, a 
steward, a major-domo. This use of the word is by what may be 
called attraction. It corresponds to the outward " furniture" 
of gods and Olympus as the factors that must be reduced to 
the level of man's furniture and homes. 

Note 44. This active use of "foible," properly a noun of 
defect, is characteristic of Emerson's insistence upon the es- 
sential, central virtue and strength of human nature, and of 
his habit of making evil a temporary falling away into an alien 
condition. 

Note 45. The reference is to Jesus Christ. 

Note 46. A tributary of the Thames. There was a place of 
execution on the Tyburn near what is now the Marble Arch, 
Hyde Park. In 1783 the executions were removed to Newgate. 
This is an example of attracted diction. The change of pitch 
from Calvary to Tyburn is fully appreciated by Emerson. 
Some readers are hardly furnished with the needed rhetorical 
fortitude. 

Note 47. The close of this essay is one of the most per- 



NOTES 157 

fectly "concerted" treatments of a rhetorical motif. All the 
implications of Compensation, Experience, and Character are 
here gathered up into a single chord. In the word " compliment" 
may be found an element to reappear in Behavior and Man- 
ners. 

SELF-RELIANCE 

The introduction to this essay in the Centenary Edition is 
in part the following : — 

Thus it appears that the writings of Landor (Imaginary 
Conversations), read the year before Mr. Emerson sought him 
out in Rome, may have given the original push towards the 
writing of this essay on "Self-Reliance." A small portion of 
the essay came from the lecture "Individualism," the last in the 
course on "The Philosophy of History" in 1836-37, and other 
passages from the lectures "School," "Genius," and " Duty," in 
the course on "Human Life," 1838-39. 

In reading this essay, it is well to call to mind, 1st, Mr. Emer- 
son's fear of weakening the effect of his presentation of a sub- 
ject by qualification; 2d, That the Self he refers to is the higher 
self, man's share of divinity. 

Note 1. The reference may be to Washington Allston or 
to William Blake. 

Note 2. See "Days" in Poems. 

Note 3. The phrase " preestablished harmony" is a highly 
technical one taken from the celebrated system of Leibnitz, 
The mild assertion of the double negative "not without" con- 
veys the suggestion with a touch of humor in the use of the 
learned system's vocabulary for such ends. 

Note 4. The delicate humor and abiding humanity of Em- 
erson are at their best in his characterization of youth, under 
Domestic Life, Cent. Ed. Vol. VII, p. r04: — 

" But chiefly, like his senior countrymen, the young Ameri- 
can studies new and speedier modes of transportation. Mis- 
trusting the cunning of his small legs, he wishes to ride on the 
necks and shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter nothing 
can withstand — no seniority of age, no gravity of character; 
uncles, aunts, grandsires, grandams, fall an easy prey; he con- 
forms to nobody, all conform to him; all caper and make mouths 
and babble and chirrup to him. On the strongest shoulders he 
rides, and pulls the hair of laurelled heads." 

Education, Cent. Ed. Vol. X, p. 139: "They know truth from 
counterfeit as quick as the chemist does. They detect weakness 
in your eye and behavior a week before you open your mouth, 
and have given you the benefit of their opinion quick as a 
wink. ... If I can pass with them, I can manage well enough 
with their fathers." 

Note 5. The question of grammar here is an interesting 
one. The cadence of the sentence was perhaps the determining 



158 NOTES 

consideration. Of course Milton and Mrs. Hemans afford simi- 
lar constructions in "than whom " and "all but he." 

Note 6. One of the Windward Islands in the British West 
Indies, of much interest to Abolitionists from its negro popula- 
tion. 

Note 7. Cf. History for another treatment of this theme. 

Note 8. The active form of this verb is unusual. 

Note 9. The economy of expression in this phrase is worthy 
of attention. See the phrase, "let the ape and tiger die," 
Tennyson, In Memoriam, CXVII, 24. 

Note 10. The variety of forms and associations in which 
this thought has been presented in the essays thus far is worthy 
of analysis and some attempt at classification. Is it inadver- 
tent repetition? 

Note 11. It may be interesting to reproduce here the ver- 
sion of the first edition, with a ruder vigor, more adapted to 
delivery in the Lyceum. 

"With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. 
He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. 
Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with pack-thread, 
do! else, if you would be a man, speak what you think to-day 
in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what 
to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict 
everything you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, 
you shall be sure to be misunderstood! Misunderstood! It is 
a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? 
Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and 
Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every 
pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be 
misunderstood/' C. E. 

Note 12. Taken in connection with the word " acrostic," the 
allusion seems to be to the poem of Publius Optatianus Por- 
phyrius. It is a eulogy of Constantine; the lines are acrostic : 
Porphyry was a pupil of Plotinus, in turn a pupil of Ammonius 
at Alexandria. 

Note 13. See " Woodnotes" in Poems. 

Note 14. In Character, Cent. Ed. Vol. X, p. 92, Emerson 
writes : " It were an unspeakable calamity if any one should think 
he had the right to impose a private wiil on others. That is the 
part of a striker, an assassin. All violence, all that is dreary and 
repels, is not power but the absence of power." 

Note 15. An older phrase for "takes precedence of." 

Note 16. See Induction to Shakespeare's The Taming of 
the Shrew. 

Note 17. Iskander Bey, George Castriota, 1403-1468, is 
referred to. He maintained his independence of Amurath II and 
of Mohammed II in Albania. 

Note 18. See Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, II, 3, 124. "Dost 
thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more 
cakes and ale?" 



NOTES 159 

Note 19. This is reminiscent of Wordsworth's Ode, Intima- 
tions of Immortality, IX : — 

Hence in a season of calm weather 

Though inland far we be 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 

Which brought us hither, 

Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 

The entire Ode should be compared with the teaching of this 
essay concerning "the life by which things exist." With both 
should be compared The Over-Soul, Cent. Ed. Vol. I. 

Note 20. See "The Sphinx" in Poems. "These roses," etc. is 
the constructive illustration to be added to previous expres- 
sions of Emerson's dislike and distrust of " reference." So also 
the " reverted eye." 

Note 21. This use of "agent" is an example of Emerson's 
keen sense of etymology. From time to time, he is startlingly 
precise. 

Note 22. This phrasing again depends upon strict etymology 
for its force. It is not common usage in speech. 

Note 23. See the treatment of this theme in Character. 

Note 24. Compare with Domestic Life. Cent. Ed. Vol. VII. 

Note 25. This infrequent use of "allow" seems to be the 
one given in the Century Dictionary as meaning "to approve, 
justify, or sanction." 

Note 26. The name of the Icenian Queen in the play usually 
attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher and performed before 
1619. Caratach is General of the Britons, cousin to Bonduca, 
and a man of heroic mould. The quotation is from the close 
of the first scene of the third act, but does not have quite the 
introduction suggested by Emerson. Bonduca says, "I would 
know further, Cousin, " after the god has replied by fire to 
Caratach 's salutation in place of " fretful prayers, " " winnings, " 
and "tame petitions." Another extract from Act I, Sc. 1 of this 
play is given in Parnassus, where it is assigned to Beaumont and 
Fletcher. Emerson, however, may very well have chosen to 
exhibit some of his insight as a higher critic; for the lion's share 
of this play, as of others, belongs to Fletcher. 

Note 27. In thus dealing with prayer, Emerson has lifted 
his opposition to reference, repetition, and slavery to the past 
to the highest level. Prayer seems thus the nth power of con- 
secrated, impersonal will in character. The usual phrasing would 
be hindered from, not of, meeting. But the use of the older 
phrasing gives solemnity to the thought. Kipling's poem of 
Tomlinson is a satirical expression of this idea even more drastic 
than Emerson's. 

Noth 28. John Locke, 1632-1704, one of the most influ- 
ential English philosophers of modern times. He was founder 
of the sensational philosophy and psychology. His chief work 



160 NOTES 

is the "Essay concerning Human Understanding." The skep- 
tical deve^pment of his principles by Hume led Kant to the 
elaboration of his critical philosophy. Antoine Laurent La- 
voisier, b. 1743, guillotined 1794, was a celebrated French 
chemist, founder of modern chemistry, reformer of chemical 
nomenclature. Charles Hutton, 1737-1823, an English mathe- 
matician. James Hutton, 1726-1797, a Scottish geologist and 
natural philosopher. Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832, an Eng- 
lish jurist and utilitarian philosopher. Frangois Marie Charles 
Fourier, 1772-1837, a noted French socialist, propounderof the 
cooperative system of society known as Fourierism. It ar- 
ranges society in groups, according to occupation, capacities, and 
attractions, to live in phalansteries, or common dwellings. 

Note 29. The quite possible paradox of this phrase was 
perfectly understood and accepted by Emerson. 

Note 30. See Lamb: " How would he chirp and expand over 
a muffin." South Sea House. See Goethe, Faust, " Prolog im 
Himmel:" — 

"Er scheint mir, mit Verlaub von Ew. Gnaden, 
Wie eine der langbeinigen Cicaden, 
Die immer fliegt und fliegend springt, 
Und gleich im Gras ihr altes Liedchen singt." 

Roughly translated: " He (man) seems to me, by permission of 
your Grace, like one of these long-legged grasshoppers, that al- 
ways flies and flying, jumps, and in the grass chirps its monoto- 
nous little old song." 

Plato has a passage in the Phcedrus which might easily have 
been the suggestion and served as a background for Emerson's 
expression. 

"Soc. There is time yet, and I can fancy that the grass- 
hoppers who are still chirruping in the sun over our heads are 
talking to one another and looking at us. . . .A lover of music 
like yourself ought surely to have heard the story of the grass- 
hoppers, who are said to have been human beings in the age 
before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared 
they were ravished with delight; and singing always, never 
thought of eating and drinking, until at last they forgot and 
died. And now they live again in the grasshoppers; and this 
is the return which the Muses make to them, — they hunger 
no more, neither thirst any more, but are always singing from 
the moment that they are born, and never eating or drinking; 
and when they die they go and inform the Muses in heaven who 
honors them on earth." Compare also "Let them rave," 
Tennyson, A Dirge, where the phrase is under a refrain. 

Note 31. See " Written in Naples," " Written at Rome," 
in Poems. 

Note 32. The vague and shifting meaning of ' 'quaint" admira- 
bly fits it for the use Emerson makes of it in relation at once 
to grandeur of thought, to beauty, and to convenience. 

Note 33. This expression in dignified writing is exceedingly 



NOTES 161 

rare. The phrase, however, is a kind of slang of curio hunters 
and providers. Atmospherically its appearance with this dis- 
cussion of travelling for a background to the value of person- 
ality is dramatic, if also a trifle whimsical. 

Note 34. An example of transferred epithet and of the use 
of suggestion in sculpture as an " utterance. " The variety of 
phrasal form in this sentence is noticeable. 

Note 35. This treatment of Experience in the concrete is 
paradoxical to the extent that it takes account of the principle 
of Compensation. This doctrine has been held, however, by great 
authorities in history. Doctor Edward Freeman repeatedly 
maintained its truth. 

Note 36. Phocion, 402-317 b. c, Athenian statesman and 
general and leader of the aristocratic party. He opposed De- 
mosthenes. 

Note 37. See Experience, Note 46. 

Note 38. Parry, Sir William Edward, 1790-1855, an Eng- 
lish navigator and Arctic explorer. 

Note 39. Franklin, Sir John, 1786-1847, English Arctic ex- 
plorer. In 1845 he led an expedition in search of the north- 
west passage. It was last spoken July 26, 1845. Thirty-nine 
relief expeditions were sent out between 1847 and 1857. Captain 
Leopold McClintock found traces of the missing expedition in 
1859, among them a paper giving the date of Franklin's death. 
His cenotaph in Westminster Abbey has this tribute from 
Tennyson: — 

"Not here ! the White North has thy bones ; and thou, 
Heroic sailor-soul, 
Art passing on thine happier voyage now 
Toward no earthly pole." 

Note 40. See second motto of Compensation. 

Note 41. The dual thought closing this essay allies it with 
all that has gone before. It completes while it discriminates- 
The self honored by Emerson is no child of greed or appetite, 
but of renunciation and aspiration. Kipling's Kim gives the 
story of different quests after selfhood. The boy Kim's adven- 
tures, the old red Lama's effort to escape from the wheel of 
things, and Hurru Babu, " the fearful" man's wish to be made a 
member of the Royal Society for taking Ethnological Notes, 
The story of Kim's reinforcement of his own will by training is 
told dramatically, pp. 242 et seq. : — 

"Yet the jar — how slowly the thoughts come! — the jar 
had been smashed before his eyes. Another wave of prickling 
fire raced down his neck, as Lurgan Sahib moved his hand. 

" 'Look! it is coming into shape! ' said Lurgan Sahib. So far 
Kim had been thinking in Hindi, but a tremor came on him, and 
with an effort like that of a swimmer before sharks, who hurls 
himself half out of the water, his mind leaped up from a dark- 
ness that was swallowing it and took refuge in — the multipli- 
cation table in English! 



162 NOTES 

'"Look! It is coming into shape !.' whispered Lurgan Sahib. 

" The jar had been smashed — yes, smashed — not the 
native word, he would not think of that — but smashed into 
fifty pieces, and twice three was six and thrice three was nine, 
and four times three was twelve. He clung desperately to trie 
repetition. The shadow-outline of the jar cleared like a mist 
after rubbing eyes. There were the broken shards; there was 
the spilt water drying in the sun, and through the cracks of 
the verandah showed, all ribbed, the white house-wall below — 
and thrice twelve was thirty-six! 

" ' Look! Is it coming into shape V asked Lurgan Sahib. 

" { But it is smashed — smashed/ he gasped. — Lurgan Sahib 
had been muttering softly for the last half -minute. Kim wrenched 
his head aside. ' Look! Dekko! It is there as it was there!' 

"'It is there as it was there/ said Lurgan, watching Kim 
closely while the boy rubbed his neck. ' But you are the first 
of a many who have ever seen it so/ He wiped his broad fore- 
head." 

At the close of the matchless scene between the half drowned 
but illuminated lama and the Mohammedan horse-dealer, the 
latter in the full spirit of our essay's close addresses the lama: — 

"Allah forbid it! Some men are strong in knowledge, Red 
Hat. Thy strength is stronger still. Keep it — I think thou wilt." 



HEROISM 

The following is part of the account of this essay given in 
the Centenary Edition : — 

This essay is probably the lecture of that name essentially 
as delivered in the course on "Human Culture" in Boston, 
in the winter of 1837-38. 

The homage which Mr. Emerson felt bound to render to 
the lowly virtues of Prudence after dealing with "the fine 
lyric words of Love and Friendship," made an interesting 
contrast for his hearers, the more effective by his leading them 
up to the heights of Heroism in the succeeding lecture. 

In a lecture called "The Present Age," delivered in the 
following year, this expression occurs, — his recognition of 
the awakening of those days to the need of individual, social, 
and political reform: "Religion does not seem now to tend 
to a cultus, but to a heroic life. He who would undertake it 
is to front a corrupt society and speak rude truth, and he must 
be ready to meet collision and suffering." 

The saying of Mahomet alone served for motto in the first 
edition. 

Note 1 . These names might properly enough be mere speci- 
mens of the grand style of nomenclature used by Emerson 
to keep up the level of literary suggestion, but as a matter of 
fact, Rodrigo is one of the rivals in the play called The Pilgrim, 



NOTES 163 

Pedro is the other. Valerio is a gentleman in another play 
of Beaumont and Fletcher's, A Wife for a Month, 

Note 2. In this list of plays, all from Beaumont and Fletcher, 
Mr. Emerson evidently trusted to his memory, and gave to one 
the name from a leading character. There is no play by the name 
of " Sophocles, " but the extract given is from a piece called 
"Four Plays in One," the special play being "The Triumph of 
Honor." This is founded on a story of Boccaccio's in the 
Decameron, the tenth day and the fifth novel. C. E. 

Note 3. See Scott's Old Mortality, chap. xlii. 

Note 4. A selection of rare pamphlets from the library of 
Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford (1661-1724). 

Note 5. A small town in Saxony, the scene of two battles, 
one in 1632, when Gustavus Adolphus, though victorious, died, 
the other in 1813, when Napoleon Bonaparte gained an incon- 
clusive victory. 

Note 6. Simon Ockley, 1678-1720, an English Orientalist, 
whose chief work was a History of the Saracens. 

Note 7. See essay on Plutarch, in Lectures and Biographi- 
cal Sketches. 

Note 8. The form of this phrase may illustrate the faint 
distinction between the personal and the impersonal in the 
usage of Emerson. The customary expression is "the hero's 
is a mind," etc. In the Phcedo of Plato, Jowett's translation, 
occurs this passage : " Wherefore, I say, let a man be of good cheer 
about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments 
of the body as alien to him, and rather hurtful in their effects, 
and has followed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life; 
who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are 
temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth — 
in these arrayed she is ready to go on her journey to the world 
below when her time comes." 

Note 9. See essay on Prudence, Cent. Ed., Vol. ii. "Pru- 
dence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. 
It is the outmost action of the inmost life. It is God taking 
thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It 
is content to seek health of body by complying with physical 
conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect. 

" The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist 
for itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or 
law of shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows 
that its own office is subaltern." 

Note 10. This is another way of putting the truth of the 
saying that there's only a step from the sublime to the ridicu- 
lous. Thomas Paine and Napoleon Bonaparte both make use 
of the idea, undoubtedly Paine's was the earlier. 

Note 11. This very interesting passage is reminiscent of 
Shakespeare's characterization of the seven ages of man in As 
You Like It, II, vii, and of Wordsworth's picture of the boy 
in the Ode on Intimations of Immortality. It suggests also Emer- 



164 NOTES 

son's own picture of his son in the Threnody. There is clearly 
to be seen his curious, quaint, other-worldly humor in the in- 
version of values and the unexpected close in " earnest non- 
sense." 

Note 12. Shakespeare's Henry IV, Pt. II, II, ii. 

Note 13. According to the Centenary Edition the author of 
an Oriental Geography, translated by Sir George Ously. The 
anecdote is somewhat differently worded. 

Note 14. This phrase suggests the appeal of an enthusiastic 
teacher to his class that the members should help to make God 
possible. Reflection shows more than mere rhetoric, levity, or 
irreverence in the utterance. It is the paradox of truth with em- 
phasis on the aspect now called " Pragmatism." 

Note 15. John Eliot, 1604-1690, the "Apostle of the Indi- 
ans." Author of a translation of the Bible into the Indian lan- 
guage, a catechism, and a grammar. jfc. 

Note 16. The use of the word " temperance " here haF*a 
touch of Emerson's characteristic paradox. The event is nar- 
rated in 1 Chronicles xi, 16-19. 

Note 17. An interesting comparison exists between this pas- 
sage and Emerson's " to be great is to be misunderstood," where 
the implication is almost the obverse of the one here. Compare 
Matthew xii, 16-19, part of which is : " The Son of man came eat- 
ing and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and 
a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom 
is justified of her children." 

Note 18. Another version of this story is told by Plutarch 
in his " Apothegms of Kings and Great Commanders," in the 
Morals, "When Paetilius and Quintus accused him of many 
crimes before the people; 'On this very day,' he said, 'I con- 
quered Hannibal and Carthage; I for my part am going with 
my crown on to the capitol to sacrifice; and let him that pleaseth 
stay and pass his vote upon me.' Having thus said, he went his 
way, and the people followed him, leaving his accusers declaim- 
ing to themselves." C. E. 

Note 19. The use of "condemnation" here is paradoxical. 
Socrates finally accepted a formal condemnation, but he pro- 
tested against its justice in the most emphatic way possible. 
The Prytaneum was the meeting-place of the presidents of the 
Senate, where they were entertained at the public charge to- 
gether with those who were so honored for ancestral or personal 
service. Socrates declared that he should be honored in this 
way instead of being punished. 

Note 20. In Anne Manning's delightful The Household of 
Sir Thomas More the entry in Meg's (his daughter's) journal 
is: "Dr. Clement hath beene with us. Sayth he (Sir Thomas 
More) went up as blythe as a bridegroom to be clothed upon 
with mortality." The traditional anecdotes are that as Sir 
Thomas was mounting the scaffold in the Tower he said to a 
bystander, " Friend, help me up; when I come down again I can 



NOTES 165 

shift for myself; " and after he had laid his head on the block he 
lifted it to arrange his beard, saying, " for it has never committed 
treason.' ' 

Note 21. An example of Emerson's abiding sense of the 
relations of things and his love of paradox. In the nature of 
the case, the world cannot have Blue Laws. In actual fact, the 
Blue Laws existed only in the imagination of persons opposed 
to the adoption by the early authorities of the New Haven 
Colony of the Scriptures as their code of law and government 
and their strict application of the Mosaic principles. Popularly 
the term means harsh and inquisitorial enactment of petty 
regulation. 

Note 22. In the account given by Plutarch, Epaminondas, 
serving in the battle of Mantinea side by side with Pelopidas, 
who fell seemingly mortally wounded, protected him at the 
risk of his own life. This is thought to have laid the foundation 
of one of the most enduring of friendships. 

Note 23. The use of "handsome" in this connection is 
quaint and archaic and peculiarly Emersonian. 

Note 24. Bayard, Pierre du Terrail, Chevalier de, 1475- 
1524, a French national hero, — " the knight without fear and 
without reproach." 

Note 25. Sidney, Algernon, c. 1622-1683, an English patriot, 
one of the leaders of the Independents. 

Note 26. Hampden, John, 1594-1643, one of the "five 
members" impeached by Charles 1, 1642. 

Note 27. See " Musketaquid " in Poems. 

Note 28. _ Called the " Tenth Muse," by Plato in the Phcedrus. 
A Greek lyric poet who lived about 600 b. c. Aristotle accepts 
her as the "poetess" as he does Homer as the "poet." 

Note 29. Sevigne, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de, 
1626-1696. A French author famous for her letters to her 
daughter. 

Note 30. De Stael (-Holstein), Anne Louise Germaine 
Necker, Baronne de, 1766-1817, a celebrated French writer 
greatly disliked by Napoleon Bonaparte. See Social Aims. 
She was " the most extraordinary con verser that was known in 
her time." 

Note 31. A Greek goddess of law, order, and abstract right. 

Note 32. It is possible that Emerson had in mind the epi- 
sode in Antony and Cleopatra, III, xi: — 

Cleo. O my lord, my lord, 
Forgive my fearful sails! I little thought 
You would have followed. 

Ant. Egypt, thou knew'st too well 
My heart was to thy rudder tied by the strings, 
And thou shouldst tow me after. O'er my spirit 
Thy full supremacy thou knew'st, and that 
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods 
Command me. 



166 NOTES 

Note 33. This note in the Centenary Edition gives an inter- 
esting emphasis to this advice: "Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do 
what you are afraid to do: sublimity of character must come 
from sublimity of motive. " These were the teachings which the 
Emerson boys received in their youth from their brilliant, loving, 
and eccentric aunt, Miss Mary Moody Emerson. Her nephew has 
left an account of her in Lectures and Biographical Sketches. 
His words concerning her are carved upon her gravestone in Con- 
cord Cemetery : "She gave high counsels. It was the privilege 
of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indi- 
cated to their childhood, a blessing which nothing else in edu- 
cation could supply." 

Note 34. Born 402 b. c, put to death 317 b. c. A celebrated 
Athenian general and statesman, advocate of the policy of peace 
with Macedon in opposition to Demosthenes. He was a leading 
aristocrat. In Uses of Great Men : " I applaud a sufficient man, 
an officer equal to his office; captains, ministers, senators, I like 
a master standing firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, hand- 
some, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by 
fascination into tributaries and supporters of his power. . . . 
But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and all he- 
roes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons, 
this subtilizer and irresistible upward force into our thought, 
destroying individualism; the power so great that the poten- 
tate is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a constitution 
to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and 
releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor 
who can spare his empire.' ' 

Note 35. In Uses of Great Men : " Our globe discovers its hid- 
den virtues, not only in heroes and archangels, but in gossips 
and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that lodged the due 
inertia in every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, the 
anger at being waked or changed? Altogether independent of 
the intellectual force in each is the pride of opinion, the security 
that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing 
idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is left to 
chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities of 
all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of wrong. Not 
one has a misgiving of being wrong." 

Note 36. The Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a Presbyterian min- 
ister of intelligence, courage, and blameless character, devoted 
himself to the cause of awakening public sentiment. in the 
Southern and Border States to the wrong of slavery and its evil 
results, and became editor of the St. Louis Observer. His press 
was destroyed by a mob, and he and his family were driven from 
the city. He then settled in Alton, Illinois, and established his 
paper, maintaining anti-slavery views. Riots resulted, and three 
presses, furnished in succession by friends of the cause, were 
destroyed. Mr. Lovejoy sent for another press. A public meet- 
ing of citizens was called because of the excited state of public 



NOTES 167 

opinion in the city. Resolutions were passed requiring Love joy 
to retire from the charge of his paper. He stood upon his rights 
under the Constitution to publish his beliefs freely. To the de- 
mand that in deference to mob law he should yield up his post, 
he said: "This I never will do. God in his providence — so say 
all my brethren, and so I think — has devolved upon me the 
responsibility of maintaining my ground here; and, Mr. Chair- 
man, I am determined to do it. A voice comes to me from Maine, 
from Massachusetts, from Connecticut, from New York, from 
Pennsylvania, — yea, from Kentucky, from Mississippi, from 
Missouri, calling upon me in the name of all that is dear in 
heaven or earth to stand fast, and by the help of God / will stand. 
I know I am but one and you are many. My strength will avail 
but little against you all. You can crush me if you will, but I 
shall die at my post, for I cannot and will not forsake it." The 
press arrived and was lodged by his friends in a stone warehouse 
belonging to one of a gallant little company who undertook to 
defend the right of free speech. On the night of November 7, 
1837, the mob demanded the press. The city authorities gave no 
protection. Mr. Love joy's friends refused to surrender and were 
attacked. They resisted, and when the building was set on fire, 
Lovejoy, coming out to prevent it, was shot dead. 

Mr. George P. Bradford, one of Mr. Emerson's nearest friends, 
described to me the occasion when he delivered this discourse 
in Boston. Towards the end of the lecture, while carrying his 
audience — the cultivated people of Boston — with him, in 
full sympathy with devoted courage in other times and lands, 
suddenly, looking his hearers in the eyes, he brought before 
them the instance in their own day and country, and told of the 
martyrdom of Lovejoy for the right of free speech. Mr. Brad- 
ford said that a cold shudder seemed to run through the audi- 
ence at this calm braving of public opinion twenty years before 
its ripening in the great war for freedom. Of course Lovejoy had 
other defenders in Boston, notably Wendell Phillips, who first 
entered the lists as an anti-slavery champion at the time of his 
slaying. C. E. 

Note 37. See Thomas a Kempis, Book I, chap, xx: "If thou 
wilt withdraw thyself from speaking vainly, and from gadding 
idly, as also from hearkening after novelties and rumors,thou shalt 
find leisure enough and suitable for meditation on good things. 
The greatest saints avoided the society of men, Heb. xi, 38, 
when they could conveniently; and did rather choose to live to 
God in secret. One said: ' As oft as I have been among men, I 
returned home less a man than I was before. [Seneca, Ep. VII.] 
. . . No man doth safely speak, but he that is glad to hold his 
peace. No man doth safely rule, but that is glad to be ruled.' " 

Note 38. These lines were evidently quoted from memory 
from A Dirge, one of Tennyson's early poems. The burden, 
"Let them rave," runs through all the verses. The following 
one comes as near the lines as quoted as any of them : — 



168 NOTES 



Thou wilt not turn upon thy bed; 
Chaunteth not the brooding bee 
Sweeter tones than calumny? . 

Let them rave. 
Thou wilt never raise thine head 
From the green that folds thy grave — 

Let them rave. C. E. 



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129. Plato's Judgment of Socrates. Translated by P. E. More. Paper ; .15. 



C&e SSitoergtoe literature £me£-cwa««* 

130. Emerson's The Superlative, and Other Essays. "Paper, .15. 

131. Emerson's Nature, and Compensation. Paper, .15. , 

132. Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum, etc. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

133. Schurz's Abraham Lincoln. Paper, .15. 

134. Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. Paper, .30. Also 'in RolJ Vs Students* 

Series, to Teachers, net, .53. 

135. Chaucer's Prologue. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

136. Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, and The Nun's Priest's Tale. Paper, .15. 

Nos. J35, 136, one vol., linen, .40. 

137. Bryant's Iliad. Books I, VI, XXII, and XXIV. Paper, .15. 

138. Hawthorne's The Custom House, and Main Street. Paper, .15. 

139. Howells's Doorstep Acquaintance, and Other Sketches. Paper, .15. 

140. Thackeray's Henry Esmond. Paper, .60; linen, .75. 

141. r Jhree Outdoor Papers, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Paper, .15. 

142. Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. Selections. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

143. Plutarch's Life of Alexander the Great. North's Translation. Paper, .15. 

144. Scudder's The Book of Legends. Paper, .15; #»*«, .25. 

145. Hawthorne's The Gentle Boy, etc. Paper, .15. 

146. Longfellow's Giles Corey. Paper, .15. 

147. Pope's Rape of the Lock, etc. Paper, .15; #><*#, .25. 
148- Hawthorne's Marble Faun. Paper, .50; linen, .60.* 

149. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Paper, .15; te, .25. 

150. Ouida's Dog of Flanders, and The Nurnberg Stove. Pa., .15 ; linen, .25. 

151. Ewing's Jackanapes, and The Brownies. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 
1*52. Martiocau's The Peasant and the Prince. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

153. Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dre?m. Pater, .15. 

154. Shakespeare's Tempest. Paper, .15 ; £fc/, .25, 

155. Irving's Life of Goldsmith. Paper, .45; Ihen, .56. 

156. Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, etc. Rape--, .15; //«*«, .25. 

157. The Song of Roland. Translated by Isabel Bmtler. Pa., .30; linen, .40. 

158. Malory's Book of Merlin, and Book of Sir Balin. Pa.,\iy, linen, .25. 

159. Beowulf. Translated by C. G. Child. Paper, .15; linen, .25. 

160. Spenser's Faerie Queene. Book I. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

161. Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. Paper, .45 ; //>/«/, .50. 

162. Prose and Poetry of Cardinal Newman Selections, {hi preparation) 

163. Shakespeare's Henry T. Paper, .15 ; linen, .25. 

164. De Quincey ; s Joan of Arc, and The English Mail-Coach. /*<*., .15 ; //#., .25 

165. Scott's Quentin Durward. Paper, .50; linen, .60. 

166. Carlyle/s Heroes and Hero-Worship. Paper, .45; linen, .$0. 

167. Norton's Memoir of Longfellow. Paper, .15; /*>/<?w, .25. 

168. Shelley's Poems. Selected. Paper, .45; linen, .50. 

169. Lowell's My Garden Acquaintance, etc. Paper, .15. 

170. Lamb's Kssh' t s cf. Elia. Selected. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

171,172. Emerson s '"/.says. Selected. In two^parts, each, Paper. ,15 ; Nos. 
171, 172, one vol., linen, .40. 

EXTRA NUMBERS 

A American Authors and their Birthdays. Paper, .15. 

7? Portraits and Biographical Sketches of 20 American Authors. Paper.. > q 

C A Longfellow Night. Paper, .15. 

Z? Scudder's Literature in School. Paper, .15. 

tf Dialogue and Scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe. Paper, .15. 

/'" Longfellow Leaflets. Paper, .30 ; &W», .40. 

(7 Whifctier Leaflets. Paper, .30; linen, net, .40. 

// Holmes Leaflets. P-aper, .30; #^<?x, .40. 

/ Hoibrook's Northland Heroes. Linen, .35. 

A" The Riverside Primer and Reader. Linen, .30. 

A The Riverside Song Book. Paper, .30 ; boards, .40. 

71/ Lowell's Fable for Critics. Paper, .30 

A A Selections from the Writings of Eleven American Authors. Pa., .15. 

(7 Lowell Leaflets. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

P Hoibrook's Hiawatha Primer. Linen, .40. 

<) Selections f • .m the Writings of Eleven English Authors. Paper, .15. 

A' Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. Selected. Paper. .20; //??<?«, .30. 

^ Irving's Essays from the Sk etch-Book. Selected. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

U A Dramatization of The Song of Hiawatha. Paper, .15. 

K Hoibrook's Book of Nature Myths. Linen, .45. 

W Brown's In the Days of Giants. Linen, .50. 

X Poems for the Study of Language. Paper, .30; linen, .40. 

V Warner's In the Wilderness. Paper, .20 ; linen, .30. 

Z Nine Selected Poems. N. Y. Regents' Requirements. Pa., .15; linen, .25. 





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